A Magician Without her Books

Why the odds were stacked against Sigourney Weaver’s Prospero

Sigourney Weaver is a great actress. She just is. The Tempest is a great play. It just is.

So why did Weaver’s turn as Prospero, Shakespeare’s magician-hero, attract such unfavourable press during Jamie Lloyd’s recent production at the West End’s Theatre Royal Drury Lane?

Many critics took particular issue with Weaver’s performance, slating her ability to speak verse — that style of poetic speech associated with Shakespeare — calling her performance flat and even implying (patronisingly) that she didn’t understand her lines. Whatever you thought about her delivery, there was one particular aspect of Jamie Lloyd’s direction that seemed to me to have caused huge problems for Weaver and made her job unnecessarily hard. It all boils down to the way the production treats magic and, more specifically, the magical authority of Prospero

The Wronged Duke

To recap: Prospero was once Duke of Milan but his fascination with the study of the occult distracted him from his duties, giving his wicked brother the opportunity to steal the dukedom. Prospero and his daughter Miranda, still a toddler at the time, had escaped to sea and were washed up on a magical island. Luckily for them both, kindly courtier Gonzalo had snuck some vital spell books onto their boat.

We begin the story many years later w hen Prospero has used this smuggled knowledge to become the magical monarch of the island. Phenomenal cosmic power, itty bitty living space. Now, a ship is passing by which Prospero realises contains a number of his enemies, including his treacherous brother, and he conjures a storm to wash them up on his shores where he will use his power to put these wrongs to right.

The concept of authority is central to the play. We watch Prospero proving his supernatural authority by subduing the magical inhabitants of the island; they complain about the work he makes them do but are always brought sternly back under his control. The various would-be kings and usurpers of the human realm who wash up in the shipwreck are likewise put back in their place to ensure the happy ending where Prospero resumes his dukedom and returns to Italy. Judiciously, at the end of the play, he puts his ‘rough magic’ aside as he leaves the strange island behind.

If we don’t believe that Prospero is powerful, much of the plot falls apart. If we don’t believe in the mightiness of his wizardry, it means little when he says he’s giving it up. So how does an actor playing Prospero embody this central trait?

Making Authority

There’s a drama game I’ve played where everyone in the room is told to ‘act like a king.’ People preen and sweep and hold their shoulders high, but it feels a bit empty. Then the leader of the exercise picks a single person and tells everyone else ‘act like they’re a king.’ The room transforms, the ‘king’ barely has to do anything: the bowing and kowtowing gives them a sense of grandeur even if they’re standing mute ands still. Props and costumes can be fetched to drape them in majesty; it becomes quickly apparent to everyone that the monarch is ‘made’ by the theatrics of power.

This is not to say that speech and gesture are not part of that equation. Interestingly, grimoires (books of magic) from the early modern period included instructions for performing successful conjurations that sound a lot like this drama game. They are training their magicians to embody the kind of power a dangerous demon will respect, drawing from the iconography of famous scholars and kings. They impress upon the would-be conjuror that even if he feels afraid, if he gets stage-fright, if you will, he should pretend he is a force to be reckoned with. Slip up, and the summoned spirit might realise it doesn’t have to obey.

Prospero is good at pretending to be crueller and angrier than he feels. He feigns disapproval of the young prince Ferdinand who has fallen in love with Miranda, testing his courage and sincerity by putting him to backbreaking work before finally revealing that he approved of the match all along. When he interacts with his unruly magical servants, he is capable of switching between benevolent encouragement and what I believe is known in footballing terms as The Hairdryer Treatment.

For some reason, Lloyd has directed Weaver to speak almost all her lines as if she is always in a casual conversational mode with no differentiation between Prospero the man (or woman in this case) and Prospero the authority, or Prospero the conjuror. There is never a sense that we are shifting up a gear, that we are getting The Big Speech, it’s all conveyed with more or less the same tone, which has led to those accusations of flatness. I have no idea what went on in the rehearsal room but it seemed to me as if she had been asked to speak every line as if it was a wholly authentic thought floating into Prospero’s mind on the spur of the moment. Ironically, this meant there was absolutely no texture and nuance to the characterisation, this Prospero never got to show off the carefully studied rhetorical powers of his magical speechmaking.

Consider this speech from Act V.i:

I have bedimm'd
The noontide sun, call'd forth the mutinous winds,
And 'twixt the green sea and the azured vault
Set roaring war: to the dread rattling thunder
Have I given fire and rifted Jove's stout oak
With his own bolt; the strong-based promontory
Have I made shake and by the spurs pluck'd up
The pine and cedar—

Here, Prospero is speaking in conjuring mode and we need to feel the chill of that commanding voice reverberating in our bones and speaking of bones, we need to imagine the fearfulness of the line

graves at my command
Have waked their sleepers, oped, and let 'em forth
By my so potent art.

Yikes! He’s talking about necromancy! This verbal catalogue of his ‘potent art’ has to be intimidating and has form a contrast with the next line:

But this rough magic I here abjure

We need to feel the power that Prospero is giving up. Jamie Lloyd has Weaver wander aimlessness around the stage here as smoke seeps in at her feet — smoke she barely acknowledges or seems to be connected to. In his production, the scene has the quality of a sleepwalker describing what they saw in a dream, not a bloodcurdling recollection of almost blasphemously godlike powers.

And it really isn’t about the sex of the actor. Helen Mirren’s Prospera was virtually the only thing unanimously praised in Julie Taymor’s 2010 film of the play. Shakespeare himself borrows lines for Prospero from Ovid’s version of Medea, an absolutely terrifying magical character. The switch that Prospero performs between these mighty boasts and his gentle abnegation of control reminds me of another speech by a supremely powerful female character. Look at that scene from The Fellowship of the Ring where Galadriel shows Frodo what she would look like if she accepted his offer to leave the One Ring in her keeping:

"In place of a dark lord you will have a queen! Not dark but beautiful and terrible as the dawn, treacherous as the sea! Stronger than the foundations of the Earth! All shall love me and despair.”

Imagine watching a speech like that on stage with all the benefits of lighting and sound design that Jamie Lloyd has at his disposal, it’d be absolutely incredible. Even if you did this with no special effects you’d know everything you needed to know about the latent power of Galadriel from her gesture and voice, everything has changed as she moves into The Big Powerful Person Speech and then shifts back again as we watch her ‘passing the test’ and turning away from temptation. Perplexingly, there seems to have been no awareness in this production of the opportunities that The Tempest provides for spinetingling moments like this.

Weaver’s delivery throughout was further hampered by the strange decision to make her sit down to one side of the action, often with her back to the other characters, motionless and detached. There are actors with enough physical presence and power to do all that needs to be done here with their voice alone, but being forced into such a small range of movements for so much of the runtime would set most actors up for failure.

The Trappings of Authority.

Prospero has a staff, magical garments and those crucial conjuring books which he mentions several times and may be represented on stage. Like the king-making exercise, these all serve to make the actor look powerful on their own and some of them perform the very practical function of making certain plot points clear.

You can maybe get away with not representing the spell books or staff even though it is Prospero’s decision to break his staff and drown his book that symbolise his parting with magic. It is a shame, because you can do some cool stuff with that, like the 2017 RSC production which incorporated screens and digital effects so that we could watch Prospero conjure a magic circle before our eyes by pointing with the staff. Jamie Lloyd isn’t interested in representing the mechanics of his magician’s craft.

More unforgiveable, I think is his complete disregard for the importance of changing costume. At the beginning of the play, after Prospero has finished conjuring the tempest, he asks Miranda to ‘pluck my magic garment from me.’ To be fair, the storm itself looked very cool in this production. We saw glimpses of the ship like a ghost behind a big swathe of fabric, but Weaver sat impassively with her back to this scene and barely looked at Miranda when she spoke that line. Instead of actually taking off a visibly magical costume, the actors mimed laying the mantle down and the big curtain behind her ascended – perhaps it was meant to represent the cloak? Highly unclear to a person who didn’t know the play.

The absence of a visible costume change set the tone for the rest of the production where Prospero always wore the same dull greys, blues and beiges as the rest of the cast. The magnificent clothes which Prospero uses to distract Trinculo and Stephano were invisible to us making it, once again, really tricky for a first time viewer to get their head around what was going on. At the end, Prospero added a small dress-like coat over the top of her clothes to signify that she was going back home again – but it was the same muted blue as so many of the other costumes and seemed to complete the outfit rather than transform its wearer.

Conclusion

With no staff, no books, no magical costume changes, no big gestures and no differentiation between spoken modes, it seemed as if the magic was happening around Weaver rather than emanating from her command of its powers. Selling Jamie Lloyd’s vision of Prospero would have been a daunting challenge for even an actor seasoned in Shakespearean verse. I’m by no means saying that it’s wrong to criticise Weaver, but she has been dealt a difficult set of cards. In the world of this retelling it is as if Lloyd has snuck in after Gonzalo and taken out the magical cargo that kept the poor exiles safe, and this Prospero, without her books, consequently struggles to control the otherworldly forces in the story.

Have you seen this production? What did you think? What versions of The Tempest got it right in your opinion?

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