Tempest written vs performed

While at the Synetic Theater performance of The Tempest, there were many things I found different between what I remember reading and what we saw. One thing I adore about live theater is the fact that the director has so much creative freedom. Shakespeare uses very little stage cues in his plays which I find to be a good thing. This allows directors to present the play how they see it. A viewer can go to multiple performances of the same play and get different meanings from it each time due to how it is performed. The play we saw had no words which made the emotions mean more. I feel like I got more out of the performance than I did out of reading the play.

One difference I saw was how Caliban and Miranda were friends at first. I might have missed it in the play, but I don’t remember there being a huge emphasis on it or even being mentioned at all. In the performance they were frolicking around the stage for a while at the beginning. They really showed the change in the relationship from friend to slave. This might be because the director decided to show Prospero’s arrival to the island first instead of in a flashback. Creative differences like this is what I find the most valuable in plays.

Another place where the creative freedom of live plays was portrayed was when the three people were trying to kill Prospero but distracted my the clothes. Instead of just showing them seeing the clothes and immediately changing to the outcome, the actors spent time playing with the clothes, dancing and playing around. There were music changes as well as lighting changes depending on the clothes they had on.

This director put a big emphasis of the comedy of the play while holding true to the other emotions portrayed. When Ariel was forcing the boy to clean, he pretended like he was going to pour a bucket of water on the audience. This broke down the barrier between audience and stage. It created a great atmosphere in which the audience felt like they could interact with what was happening infront of them. I feel like this is something Shakespeare would have approved of because where the splash-zone was for the play we saw is where the groundlings would have been in his day. He had to involve them since they were of lower education and social status and wouldn’t be as interested in the words of this play.

Seeing a play without words was a great experience. I personally feel like I became more connected to the characters, their opinions, and the story itself. I was more focused on the costuming and staging. I found myself picking up on the little details and creative decisions that I might not have noticed if I were focused on the verbiage. I am grateful for being able to see this performance and compare it to what I got out of the words as well as other Shakespeare performances.