The jury is out regarding which island, or sea rather, was actually the backdrop to Shakespeare’s The Tempest. Beyond the prospect of Shakespeare’s island existing as a figment of his imagination, the fact remains that countless productions of The Tempest are played out to audiences every year who undoubtedly interpret the story within the parameters of their own geographical worlds. There are two prominent camps, each of which has implications as to whether the play belongs to the Old or New World; a timely reflection on the European-adjacent tensions playing out between Christianity and Islam or an enlightened commentary on American colonisation. Either way, Shakespeare seems to be getting a lot of credit, as usual.
While some scholars have argued that the play takes place in the Mediterranean, just as many insist it is the Caribbean (cue buzzword Global South), which has been especially painted for us as an “embattled, ecologically precarious archipelago1Daniel R Quiles, https://www.artforum.com/print/reviews/202303/forecast-form-art-in-the-caribbean-diaspora-1990s-today-90141?tid=newsletter&sid=afs-2023-03-14” detached yet ripe with residual ramifications of colonial settlement. Just a quick recap: The Tempest follows a motley shipwrecked cast who essentially end up settling the island. Prospero, a banished European Duke, asserts himself as master of Caliban, a “monster” native to the island. The play quite literally addresses issues of civilisation, colonisation, and the concept of savagery. It was Prospero’s brother Antonio who said, “what’s past is present,” the meaning of which being tediously twofold: indicating either that what has taken place in the past sets the stage for the present, or that history repeats itself around different parametres. What about different power structures?
First of all, let us consider the infrastructure behind Shakespeare. Most people will acknowledge him as one of the top playwrights of all time. For a lot of people Shakespeare will be their most basic if not their only formal introduction to theatre. Here is a guy whose oeuvre is essentially the pinnacle of British greatness, the mascot of high white culture, the unequivocal OG writer-influencer. As I write these very words, the auto-correct on WordPress’ backend does not correct the word Shakespeare. It is literally embedded in English vernacular. Shakespeare doesn’t exactly have to fight his way into the curriculum. In fact, in 2020, Shakespeare’s Globe received a lifeline grant from the Cultural Recovery Fund as part of the UK Government’s £1.57 billion investment package to “protect the nation’s world renowned cultural, arts, and heritage institutions.”2https://www.shakespearesglobe.com/discover/blogs-and-features/2020/10/24/shakespeares-globe-awarded-a-lifeline-grant-from-the-culture-recovery-fund/ He’s essentially been tenured – but at what cost?
Could it be at the leagues of poets, writers, and unheard voices who supercede Shakespeare, and who do not happen to be English during the rise of a global Empire? The fact remains that he is “one man writing in one language in one moment in time for a specific group of people,”3Madeline Sayet, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Rh8XKqgaSOc&list=PLaAng7x1uB3ruUDIr4hVkDMmPNx8FjgOy&index=1&t=8s&ab_channel=Shakespeare%27sGlobe in a world that looked much different to ours. The guy would have seen African slaves pulling the chariot at King James’s coronation due to a shortage of lions during a mini ice age.4Ayanna Thompson, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NsUoW9eNTAw&ab_channel=OxfordAcademic%28OxfordUniversityPress%29 It sounds like another world because it was – and that’s the world in which Shakespeare lived and wrote his plays. This surely warrants some kind of cursory evaluation should they continue to be taught. Approaching Shakespeare through a lens of anti-racism is a stone that needs turning like any other, even if he was a woke wordsmith. More important, in fact, than the critical intentionality of the playwright himself is the passed-down indoctrination of Shakespeare as father of the literary footprint – his plays seemingly reproduced ad nauseam.
Martha Henry as Prospero and Michael Blake as Caliban in The Tempest at Stratford Festival, 2019. Photo by David Hou.
If the words aren’t changing and we are indeed stuck with him, then the productions need a reading of their own. To endlessly reproduce Shakespeare under the guise that he is the best playwright of all time is “completely irrational” 5Madeline Sayet and altogether implausible without the infrastructure of the systems that have disseminated him. We walk a fine line between liberal education and propagation of silent colonial histories. Thankfully, because it is poetry – and lends itself to multiple interpretations – the flexibility and inherent artistry of production is our strongest tool going forward.
In Somerset House Studios, one production did just this: The Voices of a Tempest combined installation, performance, and exhibition making to revisit the often overlooked subtext of Shakespeare’s last solo written play. Guest curated by A—Z, the show employed storytelling as a healing and activist practice, and road on the coattails of Aimé Césaire’s Une Tempête, a critical adaptation of The Tempest that is set in the Caribbean and probes the play’s colonial undertones. A—Z platform was founded by Anne Duffau, who employs the nomadic curatorial platform to encourage discursive conversations and practices that challenge antiquated hierarchies of race, gender identity, and power structures.
The exhibition was staged in Gallery 31, a free to visit, permanent exhibition space that focusses on themes of progressive activism, and was accompanied by a series of events in Three Acts; curated evenings combining readings, screenings, performances, and discussions, capped off by live DJ sets and drinks in a casual atmosphere complete with coloured flood lights and fog machines, painting a dreamy and other worldly affection onto the entire experience. The raw, knobby walls of the River Rooms play as much a part as the performances, adding texture to the projections and fostering that kind of post-industrial, wabi-sabi, decrepit chic sensibility that says, we have bigger fish to fry than to bother with engendering another white cube exhibition environment.
Act I: Release
For the first act, release was intended to convey giving freedom to someone, to feelings, to movements, & to materials. Art collective Babeworld, comprising Ash Williams, Ingrid Banerjee Marvin, Gabriella Davies, and Caitlin Chase, presented a collection of films including Derby Day, which was produced on commission for the exhibition. Other artists included Babeworld collaborator utopian_realism, & Mohammed Rowe.
Act II: Embrace
Michelle Williams Gamaker, House of Women, 2017
The second act defined embrace as enthusiastic acceptance, including one or a number of things. The programme featured screenings from Murat Adash and Michelle Williams Gamaker and performances by Matt Carter, Guy Ronen, Sarah Howe, JJ Chan, and DJ Philomène Pirecki.
The standout piece was Gamaker’s House of Women, a single-channel video installation which follows four Indian ex-pat and first generation British Asian women auditioning for a role as the silent dancing girl in a remake of the film Black Narcissus. The candidates sit under blinding studio lights as an offscreen interviewer zooms in and out on their faces, asking probing questions and testing their grace under pressure. Gamaker explores the violent and intrusive gaze of a camera and the unrelenting voyeuristic nature of contemporary culture. During the casting, the women are asked examine media portraying colonised women during the Indian Empire. These women are apparently viewed as corrupt, ignorant, and promiscuous, needing the guidance of their colonisers to achieve desirable virtues like chastity, modesty, and purity. Her heroin points out that the women were doubly colonised; first because of their nationality and secondly because of their gender.
Act III: You Make Me Feel
The final act began with Duffau reciting a string of lyrics. The mashup of famous love songs that, although sound familiar, took on fresh ubiquity with new rhythmic intonations, removed from their melodious, mainstream indicators. French artist and poet Tarek Lakhrissi proceeded to seduce with coquettish charisma. His lively, zippy cadence is like a song, using repetition like a skipping record and accentuating certain words, sometimes breaking briefly into song. He mentions walking in the street near the Casbah, and that this country isn’t my country.
I just want to feel good, he says, but he clings to the vowel, drawing out the note in a prolonged exhale. I just want to feel goooood. He then asks who can give him a hug, looking out at our green lit faces. Who can give me a hug? he repeats. The audience laughs nervously, politely, but actually everyone in the room wants to give him a hug. They just don’t know if they can. It’s one of those moments when the invisible line between audience and performer becomes abstracted, revealing the precarious and delicate suspension intrinsic to performance. Two people finally stand up and offer hugs.
Later he asks, how do you protect yourself from diaspora? How do you protect yourself from the others? How do you protect yourself from your family? How do you protect yourself from pain and love? ending with, how do fail to protect each other from each other? Lakhrissi’s lyrical allusion to othering offers a fitting question that circles back to instances of intolerance and racism observed within the story of The Tempest with Sebastian criticising Alonso for permitting his daughter to marry an African.
Tarek Lakhrissi
The end of the show overlapped for all of two days with a production of The Tempest in London at The Globe called Playing Shakespeare with Deutsche Bank: The Tempest. Despite The Globe’s other mostly white-directed 2023 productions, the upcoming Tempest production is directed by Diane Page, who has mixed race heritage (black British Jamaican and white British). Though Page has Caribbean ancestry, The Globe’s website shows no indication of confronting colonial histories at all. What is mentioned is the play being “created for young people,”6https://www.shakespearesglobe.com/whats-on/playing-shakespeare-with-deutsche-bank-the-tempest/#details (whatever that means) which may indicate a doubly missed opportunity on their part.
Gallery 31: The Voices of A Tempest
2 Dec 2022 – 19 Mar 2023
Lancaster Rooms New Wing, Somerset House
Strand, London WC2R 1LA
more info here
