Abstract
A festival of world-class Shakespeare productions broadcast online has made the COVID-19-associated lockdown far more bearable. Such giants as the National Theatre, Shakespeare’s Globe, the Schaubühne, and the Craiova International Shakespeare Festival generously opened their prodigious Shakespearean treasures to the public. A few Ukrainian theatres joined the global initiative of online streaming, and the Ivan Franko National Academic Drama Theatre – one of the country’s top five national theatres – became the national leader, with a performance every weekday over several weeks.
However rich the video collection of this theatre’s Shakespeareana may be, it was mostly kept on hold for better times. Still, the choice of The Tempest, a 2010 production directed by Serhii Masloboishchikov, a renowned Ukrainian director, scenographer, and composer, was significant. This production is remarkable for different reasons. This is the first (and to date, only) Ukrainian stage version of The Tempest (in the first-ever Ukrainian translation by a noted poet, Mykola Bazhan, in the early 1960s, included in a commemorative edition of Shakespeare’s Complete Works for the 1964 jubilee). It actually introduces The Tempest into the Ukrainian theatrical space and signifies the start of a new chapter in Ukrainian Shakespeareana.
Incidentally, during the COVID-19 pandemic, The Tempest has been a popular choice for streaming – with productions by Oskaras Koršunovas, Phyllida Lloyd (both reviewed in this issue), Declan Donnellan, Silviu Purcărete, Alexander Morfov, and perhaps others. The theme, no doubt, is topical: humanity riding a heavy storm on a flimsy little boat and in need of an optimistic story in which good ultimately triumphs over evil, and justice is served. However, Masloboishchikov’s production meets a different purpose: it demonstrates that a brilliant mind does not necessarily imply a brilliant personality.
The play opens with Miranda (Anzhelika Savchenko) sitting on the stage floor with her back to the audience in front of a TV screen, watching a gripping show. It is the shipwreck, enacted as a farce, with grotesque outcries, and disorderly, scurrilous, madcap sailors. The onscreen action recalls the magic lantern or early cinema. This phantasmagoric ambience is reinforced by the mode of watching theatre on the TV screen. So, illusion is going to be one of the leading motifs of this performance. This is manifested in the scenography, as the set is stripped back – and in the centre, an inclined wooden platform symbolises the deck of a wrecked ship, with a written fragment ‘…atria’ (patria? or simply atria – twin parts of the human heart?). This extremely mobile platform variously functions as a cliff, hill, cave, or any other piece of landscape on the enchanted island. The illusion of insularity is further enhanced by the rotating circular stage centre, where the characters roam freely, exploring the enigmas of Prospero’s estate (some of them discover a limitless supply of wine flasks). There is a piano, which may have belonged to the ship’s main saloon and survived the wreck. Alongside Prospero’s books, it harks back to a former, privileged life. The chromatic design is ‘fifty shades of grey’: the drab colour of the props and costumes accentuate the oneiric nature of the events that shy away from historical or geographic references.
Masloboishchikov has considerably reshaped the original play. He does not, for example, limit himself to trimming the original list of the dramatis personae. In the case of Ariel, he does the opposite, splitting the character into three figures, each played by a different actor: Prospero’s myrmidon (Pavlo Piskun), Prospero’s clown (Oleksandr Pecherytsia), and Prospero’s secretary (Yaroslav Hurevych). Also, Ferdinand’s role (Oleksandr Formanchuk) has been cut back, serving essentially to emphasise the strange, somewhat incestuous relationship between Prospero and Miranda. Stripped to the waist most of the time, Ferdinand lets his muscles talk, performing at one point a two-minute romantic dance lift, under the observant eye of Prospero (Oleksii Bohdanovych), who determines the tune.
The bulk of the scenic time and space is occupied by Prospero – even when he is absent from the stage, everything looks to be under his unfaltering watch and command. The magician is cast as a contradictory figure: in his own words, he is a scholar, utterly absorbed in his studies and passionately committed to his library – but he is far from being inoffensive and naïve. In fact, he is spiteful and manipulative: he puts words into Miranda’s and Ferdinand’s mouths, occasionally speaking their lines himself, thus channelling their love talk in the direction he desires. He is also some kind of control freak, constantly supplying the Ariels with written instructions and referring to a checklist. He appears to be a doting father, but his love for Miranda is of a sickly kind. Surprisingly, Caliban seems to understand Prospero and his personal axiological system best of all: when Caliban accidentally drops one of the magic books he behaves as if he has committed an unprecedented crime, since Prospero gives the impression that he cares more about his library and the written word than about anything or anyone else. This Prospero is inclined to the humanities, but not to humanism.
One of the key features of this production is that it underscores antonymy and similarity. The passionate, love-seeking Miranda is the opposite of cold-blooded, controlling Prospero, and marriage with Ferdinand is her only escape from the enchanted island and Prospero’s power. However, her father presumptuously intrudes between the lovers at the height of the proposal, and the final vow is actually made by him. In addition, the director unexpectedly treats the two other pairings – Antonio and Sebastian, Stefano and Trinculo – as two sides of the same coin. They are intriguing plotters who attempt a murder and fail, and who are played by the same pair of actors, Bohdan Beniuk and Oleksii Basha, which serves to highlight their resemblances. The run of events is arranged so that a casual spectator could hardly tell Antonio from Stefano and Sebastian from Trinculo, with a swift change of costume and shift in behaviour taking place onstage. Remarkably, in the scenes with Trinculo and Stefano, the actors genuinely improvise, obviously for the sake of greater comic effect. Hilarity reaches its peak in the scene with Iris (Basha), Juno (Beniuk), and Ceres (Hurevych). Their cross-gendered performance is designed in the tradition of a children’s matinee (piano music, reciting of poems, and childish movements), prompted by one of the Ariels with a detailed script. The only character who has neither a double nor an opposite is Caliban – he is the all-encompassing force of nature, curbed by humankind, hovering between wide-eyed gullibility and candid ire, base desires and aesthetic charms. He stands beyond the dichotomy of morality and wrongdoing, evoking fond compassion rather than strong disapproval.
The finale brings no surprises, with its focus on Prospero, who undisguises himself and recovers his dukedom. The Ariels are finally set free; they return all of Prospero’s written instructions and need some persuasion in the form of ass-kicking to leave their master. Prospero remains alone: though he has gained his noble status back, he is deprived of his true power – magic – so he has nothing more to do than to throw his now-useless papers around.
Watching a performance in lockdown considerably alters one’s reception, since one sees everything with a so-called ‘borrowed glance’ – through the eyes of a cameraman. This makes camerawork another important criterion for evaluating the performance. Moreover, being in the habit of attending performances together, we badly missed our usual exchanges, so we were texting our immediate impressions, thus clearing up the more obscure moments for each other. Nevertheless, The Tempest succeeded in providing us with a full simulation of a live theatre experience: due to technical problems, Act 2 stopped streaming 14 minutes after it began. We contacted the theatre via YouTube and on Facebook to make them aware of the problem, and then we enjoyed a prolonged interval while they were fixing their broadcasting settings. A cup of tea, drunk simultaneously 15 kilometres from each other, accommodated us during this technical tempest. Finally, the much-anticipated Act 2 arrived, with considerably enhanced video definition – which led us to inquire, like Caliban, ‘Hast thou not dropped from heaven?’ (2.2.116). And when ‘our revels’ ended, and the actors appeared on screen for the curtain call, we both hoped that in the brave new post-COVID-19 world, we could watch Shakespeare in the theatre, with our elbows touching, exclaiming ‘O wonder! / How many goodly creatures are there here!’ (5.1.182–3).