The Tempest!

I went to see The Tempest for my birthday this weekend - it's the third Bard on the Beach installement I've gone to see so far. It's one of my favorite of Shakespeare's plays to read because it's very poetic and whimsical (Romeo and Juliet is still the best though, and Richard III was awesome because he was so conniving). It's the only play Shakespeare wrote with no inspiration from a previous source as well - usually he took an idea or a play and wrote it different to make it more "blockbuster" - for example, King Lear was originally a comedy and he made it tragic for shock factor. The Tempest was solely from his imagination, and it shows. When he wrote, even if his ideas weren't really his, he transformed them into something so complex and beautiful because of the language, and in this play all of those complex and beautiful lines were embodied in the show itself.

The basic premise of the play is that Prospero used to be a Duke, but his brother usurped his title so Prospero and his daughter Miranda live on an island with Ariel, a sprite, and Caliban, a sort of half beast-half human. Prospero has magic powers so he causes a shipwreck, stranding the usurping brother, some friends, and his son Ferdinand on different parts of the island. It's a comedy, and it was comedic for sure.

Two comedic relief characters were changed to girls for the production, which I actually really liked because it created a lot of awesome sexual tension and humour which wouldn't have existed otherwise. Also, the play was full of whimsy and fantasy - masks and bubbles and strobe lights and acrobatic fairy dancers. If you're a boy, you'll still like it - I went with a very manly friend and he liked it, so never fear.

What was super cool about it was the creativity that was used. In King Lear, the tragic elements were really pumped up, in Twelfth Night, the comedy was amazingly enhanced, and in The Tempest, the fantasty is embodied really nicely. You'll see what I mean if you go, but the stage management was awesome, and the way humans were used to create boats and storms was really neat.


Plus, the play is full of sweet lines - my favorite is:

"We are such stuff as dreams are made on; and our little life is rounded with a sleep." (Act 4, Scene 1)