![]() On 5 February 1939, Dallas Bower staged a 90-minute version whose distinguished cast - including John Abbott (Prospero), George Devine (Caliban) and Peggy Ashcroft (Miranda) - was apparently not matched by a production riddled with technical slip-ups: at one stage an attempt at superimposition was marred by the onscreen appearance of a prop man. The play has had a rather more chequered history on television. The dancer Michael Clark comes across most effectively as Caliban: the rest of the supporting cast have largely decorative roles. Crammed with provocative visual and conceptual ideas, it is arguably barely comprehensible to those unfamiliar with the play, as Greenaway's images tend to swamp rather than illuminate the text (much of which is delivered offscreen, with Gielgud performing all the parts). This was a dual showcase for John Gielgud's onscreen performance as Prospero and for Greenaway's elaborate visual experiments, involving multiple layers of high-definition video images and a concept based around the twenty-four books said to have accompanied Prospero to the island. Twelve years later, Peter Greenaway made an even more radical adaptation in the form of Prospero's Books (1991). It concludes with an final-scene appearance by Elisabeth Welch, whose rendition of 'Stormy Weather' somehow fits the whole bizarre concoction to perfection. Relocated to a crumbling mansion off the Scottish coast, and drawing heavily from the spirit of the then-contemporaneous punk era, its typically eclectic cast included the poet Heathcote Williams (Prospero), Toyah Willcox (Miranda), Karl Johnson (Ariel), Peter Bull (Alonso), Ken Campbell (Gonzalo), Christopher Biggins (Stephano) and a particularly memorable Caliban from Jack Birkett. The second feature film barely qualifies as such - Rafters Players recorded their 1969 stage production on location in Cornwall under the direction of Nicholas Young, who was unable to come up with the level of invention needed to compensate for their limited resources (the project was self-financed).īy contrast, avant-garde filmmaker-painter Derek Jarman's similarly low-budget version a decade later is still regarded as one of the most original of all British Shakespeare films. ![]() Given the clearly tiny budget, some of the set pieces are very impressive, notably a tempest sequence with the action taking place on two planes. As the twelve-minute running time makes clear, this is a massive truncation of the original text, though Stow does at least attempt to encapsulate the whole play by turning it into a series of brief tableaux. ![]() ![]() The first adaptation, made in 1908 by Percy Stow, is very comfortably the most visually and conceptually inventive of all British silent Shakespeare films. Given its cinematic potential, it is unsurprising that The Tempest has been a perennial favourite with filmmakers, and it has inspired some of the most imaginative British Shakespeare films. Film and TV adaptations of Shakespeare's last solo masterpieceįirst performed in 1611 and published in the First Folio of 1623, The Tempest was one of Shakespeare's last plays (and generally agreed to be his last solo effort, the later Henry VIII being a collaboration) and seems to be a wholly original work. ![]()
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