The Tempest - The Pantaloons

With their trademark audience interaction, ad libbing, music, and, of course, Shakespeare, The Pantaloons took us to Prospero’s Isle of Wonder on Sunday 24^th August 2014, for The Tempest.

The evening was hosted by a very hard-working Ariel (Elliot Quinn), who stepped in and out of the action – playing the part of Ariel within the play, but also chatting to the audience, providing the music, and even reading out the stage directions. Would it more accurately have been named ‘Ariel’s Isle of Wonder’?

But while Ariel worked hard, it was clearly Prospero (Martin Gibbons) who held the power. There was a scene at the end where puppets were used to represent some of the characters. This was explained by Ariel as being a way of getting round the problem of having a small cast, but it also showed how the characters were puppets that Prospero had been manipulating throughout the piece.

There was also a great moment, probably only at this particular venue (Smallhythe Place), where Prospero’s words echoed magnificently back around the space. It felt as though the isle full of noises was reverberating with the power of Prospero’s speech.

And speaking of the isle full of noises, that famous speech was brought vividly to life by Thomas Judd’s Caliban. And of course a reference to its use in the Olympic opening ceremony was thrown in for good measure.

You can always rely on The Pantaloons to pick up on the cultural reference points that an audience brings with them. It might be a direct allusion to other interpretations of The Tempest – or it might be a reference to the vineyard down the road from the venue, or an ad lib about how a biologist in the audience looks like Steve Irwin. (Both of these featured in the performance at Smallhythe Place).

The bit that probably made me chuckle the most was not really Shakespeare at all: Stefano (Nicky Diss) tells Trinculo (Martin Gibbons) to be quiet – or, in Shakespearian language, ‘mum’ – and Trinculo responds with the ready retort ‘Your mum’.

That deliberate clash of the archaic and the up-to-date is one of the things that makes The Pantaloons so much fun. It was the same in their History of Britain, which I saw earlier in the summer, and which revelled in mixing the historical with the contemporary. And I dare say it will be the same in their take on Bleak House, which I am very much looking forward to seeing in the autumn.

Macbeth et son ouvrier - Ecole dramatique de Yajlou (Iran) at Espace Charles Trenet, Tain / Tournon

This was a very multilingual experience. While I was on holiday in France, I saw an adaptation of Macbeth performed by an Iranian company. It was performed, according to the programme, in Azerbaijani Turkish, with a few simple words of French thrown in here and there.

So the largely French audience on Tuesday 29^th July in Tain didn’t understand the words any more than I did. Quite a unifying experience, in a way.

As with the Globe’s multilingual season a year or two ago in London (see my reviews of the Georgian As You Like It and South African Venus and Adonis), this production had to use something other than words to communicate with the audience.

A live musical soundtrack provided by three musicians on the side of the stage helped to convey what was going on in the plot. Shadow puppetry, costume and props also combined to create a sort of symbolic visual language for the audience to interpret, and it was a very physical piece.

Although this was clearly not Shakespeare’s play in translation (it was a 45 minute piece set on a construction site), it probably did help to know already how the story of Macbeth unfolds. I think, in fact, that the few English people in the audience may have understood more than the French, simply because most of us had studied Macbeth at school.

So when Lady Macbeth started furiously rubbing her hands, we knew that this was the ‘Out damned spot’ bit. And when the three actors (for there were only three in the cast) became a sort of three-headed tangle of bodies and speech, we knew without needing words that they were representing the witches.

But for me, it wasn’t just the adaptation, the language and the physicality that made this an interesting piece. It was also interesting because of the cast.

As I said, there were only three actors. Two of these were women.

Now, I don’t know a great deal about Iranian culture (although Persepolis opened my eyes a little), but from what I’ve heard I rather gather that women on stage might be frowned upon by the authorities. So it was interesting to see the roles of Macbeth and Lady Macbeth performed by women in that context.

Was it significant that as Lady Macbeth went mad her headscarf worked its way loose and finally came off? Did I only notice that because it was an Iranian company performing in France, where there have been particular controversies over the wearing of headscarves? As neither French nor Iranian, do I interpret the piece differently from either of those audiences would? Or perhaps my gender has a bigger impact on my reading of the production?

These were questions I came away with, and I do like to leave the theatre with questions.

A very interesting evening.