[Teralogos News] InVid Review: The Tempest

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InVid Review: The Tempest

starring Kao Tsu, Jen Shan-Ta, Katrina Brandt, and Kevin Lo; directed by Gupta Patel. Published by Calcutta Interactive.  
 
Over the last few years, Shakespeare's final complete play has suffered the most tragic fate which can overtake a classic text; it has become relevant. I swear, if I see one more InVid staging which transmutes Prospero's island into an L-5 station, with Ariel as an infomorph and Caliban as an experimental bioroid, I'll claw out my implant. The one substantial exception, I suppose, was Ivana Gore's treatment; her "Globe Reborn" sequence got around to The Tempest a couple of years ago, just before it finished, as Gore obeyed her rule of strict chronology. However, that was a slinky presentation. I'm told by those who've chosen to investigate the medium that it was a technical masterpiece; apparently, you could tell that the experiencer was a sailor down among the groundlings, freshly returned from months at sea, enjoying everything he'd missed and eyeing up the women between acts. But absolutely nothing will convince me that Gore's quixotic project was anything more than a sterile exercise in "educational" reconstruction. The play deserves better than to be treated as an excuse for gimmickry of any kind.  
  
Given which, you may be surprised to learn that I found Gupta Patel's new production surprisingly effective. It is modern dress, but I'm happy to say that Patel has found a new angle. To begin with, he's located it back on an island, apparently somewhere in the Indonesian archipelago, which, thank god, means that the opening storm sequence makes some kind of sense without massive rewriting. (We may even imagine that this modern Prospero has access to weather mod technology, but the idea isn't forced on us.) And when the storm abates, we see the most daring touch, as Prospero struts across his pocket kingdom in the uniform of a TSA military officer.  
  
The idea of the old wizard as a Nanosocialist may not be entirely new, but previously he's been depicted as, at most, a Fifth Wave idealist, and an attractive spokesman. This Prospero, however, looks suspiciously like a Thai war criminal, hiding out from Chinese assassins as much as from the glib, shallow memeticists and politicians who've exiled him and classed him as "presumed dead." Kao Tsu catches the part superbly, with something of that horrible mixture of pride and detachment we saw in the patchy post-Pacific War show trials. It makes the ending of the play, normally so problematic to modern audiences (or at least to Transhumanists), as much a confession of guilt as a renunciation of power. And we are pleased by this; we may no longer believe in the dangers of magic, but we believe in "Crimes Against Humanity."  
  
The problem that this reading of the play does impose is Prospero's minions, who don't seem to be spirits or monsters (or AIs, or bioroids), but all too human lieutenants who must have accompanied Prospero in his flight from defeat in the Pacific War. Ariel, played with fine control by Jen Shan-Ta, is a dapper lieutenant and batman, responsible for the old man's computer systems and also for the state of his uniform. (In one ostentatiously restrained sequence, the InVid narrows down to a single wordless three minute sequence where the only available viewpoint is from Ariel's eyes as he polishes Prospero's boots to a mirror sheen, his own face slowly becoming visible in the jet black surface. This Ariel may not literally be the wizard's creation, but he exists to serve, and his identity is just a reflection.) Caliban (Kevin Lo) is a bodyguard and a thug, and probably a torturer, now grown bored with his position in the absence of anyone to hurt. All of which is fine in itself, but makes much of Shakespeare's dialogue about the history of the relationship - preserved intact in this production - weirdly incongruous. Even as metaphors, calling Ariel and Caliban the former servant and the child of the witch Sycorax just doesn't make sense if they are soldiers from his old unit.  
  
The production in general is naturalistic rather than realistic. There is no way that Katrina Brandt, who gives a neurotic, fastidious performance as Miranda, could be Kao's daughter, whatever her mother's origins and whatever genemods her parents might have chosen. Patel completely eschews manipulating the visual images of his actors, enabling the fine detail of their performances to shine through. The cast's professional backgrounds are diverse, although most of them come from the East Asian theatrical world, but they're all very good (except for Paul Marcos, who sleepwalks through the part of Ferdinand; he seems less transported by love, or concerned with the possibility that his future father in law may be a inclined to xoxing and nanoplague warfare, than bored to be away from a reliable Web link for ten minutes). Many of the viewpoints move close in to the cast's faces at key moments, and I found myself locking onto these, enthralled by the understated but emotive performances. The sets and locations are handsome without distracting from the play, and again are mostly real. Even the background music, compiled by the Artistic SAI "Vivex" from historical sources, displays restraint and fine judgment.  
  
So am I prepared to forgive Patel the modern dress and the "relevance"? Well, maybe, almost. His heart's in the right place. It's typical that the only synthespians in the cast are the ship's crew, glimpsed briefly at the start and end of the production; the "illusory" actors in the magical masque are all real (although they include several exotic bioroids). This might seem perverse, but I think that it shows that Patel is not obsessed with spurious relevance, but cares about the play's origins, while remembering that it is actually timeless.  On the other hand, he seems so concerned with his big idea about Prospero that he forgets about most of the rest of the cast. Antonio and the rest of Prospero's old foes are left as ciphers. Are they, we wonder, Chinese agents, collaborators, nationalist moderates, or what? There is no clear answer. But the fact that the question feels so appropriate is a sign of the production's quality.  
  
- filed by Phil Masters