PAJ72/No.1 Strehler
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NOTES ON THE TEMPEST Giorgio Strehler Translated by Thomas Simpson Giorgio Strehler (1921–1997) established the Piccolo Teatro di Milano in 1947 with a production of Carlo Goldoni’s Servant of Two Masters that went on to international acclaim and created the director’s reputation as the leader of Italian theatre in postwar Europe. Over four decades he produced definitive versions of Shakespeare ( Lear and Measure for Measure along with two productions of The Tempest), Brecht ( The Threepenny Opera and The Good Woman of Setzuan), and the great Italian dramatic authors (especially Goldoni’s The Villeggiatura Trilogy, and Pirandello’s Henry IV and The Mountain Giants). His first version of The Tempest was performed in the Boboli Gardens in Florence in 1948 with a translation by the poet Salvatore Quasimodo, and featured characters who emerged from the Garden’s famous fountains and reflecting pools. The second production, from which the following text derives, was initially staged in 1978 with a translation by longtime collaborator Agostino Lombardo, and performed in the United States in 1984. In this piece Strehler re-imagines the first twenty minutes of The Tempest through the eyes and mind of a spectator. This piece, “Shakespeare, oltre La Tempesta” was first published in La Nuova Rivista Europea, Vol. 2, No. 5, May–June 1978, 23–40; and then again in the volume Inscenare Shakespeare by Giorgio Strehler, Rome: Bulzoni Editore, 1992, pp. 106–131. n a theatre, at the proper hour, a storm bursts. Sea, wind, lightning, crashing waves batter the stage and the put the house in turmoil. In the wild disorder of I the rising and breaking waves, between one flash and the next, appears a warship, miniscule. In mortal danger, the ship slips and spins helplessly, over- whelmed. As the din builds pitilessly and the freezing wind whirls even through the theatre, the ship vanishes, and before the audience there now appears an enlarged fragment of the same ship, crowded with dark shapes rushing this way and that in panic. The caped figures stand out starkly against a shred of taut sail battered by the wind, barely held by the mainmast whose top disappears up into the flies, powerful and useless. The dark wooden floor, shiny with water, rises and lowers, heaves left and right with irregular motion, driving the figures this way and that on the ship- stage. Desperate for stability they grab at ropes, struggling against the force © 1992 Giorgio Strehler; English translation PAJ 72 (2002), pp. 1–17. 1 © 2002 Thomas Simpson Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/15202810260186611 by guest on 25 September 2021 overwhelming them. From an opening, dark within the darkness, appear and disappear the faces of other figures, faces of the “nobles,” pale and ridiculous in their festive, theatrical costumes: a king in his crown, a counselor in his plumed hat, two figures in mourning. Terrified, they talk, scream, shout remarks, insult each other, as the tempest grows ever wilder in a crescendo of cruel rapid bursts. A bos’n at a rope tries to give orders and yells at the nobles who peek out of their hole like frightened mice, to go below decks. Their titles and reigns count nothing now in this world in torment. What can a king do when nature is in chaos? Command the elements to relent? Restore order with a proclamation or law? Save life with a nod? Go ahead and try, he says. But it can’t be done. So go, go down. By now the tempest is at its peak. The mainmast bends slowly before splitting. Overwhelmed, the figures let go their ropes. All hope is lost. The waves rise to cover the fragment of ship and the human cargo that we have seen and heard for a moment among the lightning bolts and crashing thunder. They rush about as each plays their role, tragic or comic, though we still can’t make sense of the story or the characters. But there was life, some fragment of life, a microcosm, a flash of life among the electric flashes of the tempest; now it suddenly disappears in a crash of splintered wood as the sea rises to the heavens to the sound of human cries and lament, high prayers, hopeless tears. The last lightning bolt, then darkness. In the dark the tempest moves away and widens, persistent but far off. Less thunder now, it takes on a rhythmic sound, a musical allargando. In the stage’s emptiness, under a sky still dark and looming but with a huge slowing breath, as the sea slowly gives way, sucked away from the stage and disappearing into a blue edge, there appears a rocky form as though on a raft suspended over stilled ripples. Another fragment of the world flowering up out of the primeval elements. On top of the rocky shape, seen from the back, the outline of a man, alone, his arms wide open, hands sensitive and imperious, in the act of directing an unseen orchestra. With supreme craft he is quieting it down and marks out the last tremors, the final heartbeats, ever more rare. The sounds respond to his gestures. Who is this mysterious conductor in a shabby robe whose shoulders we make out, the way we see all the conductors of all the orchestras in all the theatres in the world when they ascend onto their platform? What is the meaning of his gestures and his command? He is somehow ordering the sounds that invaded the theatre moments before, he directs the tremendous lightning that, just a moment ago, was blasting away at the lives of men. But that sudden tempest, so compelling, so full of anguish, so “real”; it wasn’t real? Those human beings dying in travail; they weren’t real? That wasn’t theatrical verisimilitude? It was “pretend,” theatre within theatre! It seemed real theatre, it seemed like reality, but instead it was a theatrical invention. It must have been “commanded” by someone, someone out of sight, who pulled the strings and created the sounds and the events, from behind those beaten sails. It was a theatrical effect, the rainstorm in a show within a show, a theatrical illusion! And now that’s 2 PAJ 72 Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/15202810260186611 by guest on 25 September 2021 how we see it immediately. Because now, coming up from below in tears and hugging the man on her knees, scared to death and wet with rain, we see a little creature, a young girl, and she starts to talk as the last thunder rolls away. She speaks to her “father.” So the old conductor must be a father. Father of what? Of the world? Of the theatre? Of the spectacle of life or of the stage? Is the old man who directs the scene the “eternal father”? Because maybe the stage is the universe? It is only our planet, or is it only an island in the ocean, or is it just a miserable part of a theatre put there in front of people who watch and don’t know or can’t ever know quite what they’re seeing? True, the father commands and nature—theatre-sound-light—obeys. The father is “someone who commands.” The daughter in tears implores him to quiet the waters and the sky and the wind, if he’s the one (as he obviously is) to provoke that natural catastrophe, that disorder. Or maybe things were already driving toward catastrophe on their own? And then the old conductor ordered the chaotic fury into a kind of design or plan according to a mysterious order known only to him? Like God? But the old conductor is not God, just an impoverished old man in worn-out clothes, his robe worn away by a thousand rains and a thousand winds, who, in the midst of a naked stage, a symbol for the world, on the set-piece of a rocky reef, now with his last gestures, placates nature-theatre by smothering the flashpot lightning and the tin-sheet thunder. Now there is only a murmur of sounds and voices, mysterious, a sound coming from the wings and the flies, impalpable, quiet and disquieting. Now everything is immobile under a hanging sky that pulses just barely, with just a trace of blue, threatening. The light is still, blinding, pitiless. The glow from the sky outlines the black profile of the rock set on the shimmering black, burned, ancient and sinister, of the raft-island-world-within-a-world of the theatre. On this black which seems suspended in the geometry of a motionless, eternal sea, there are residue of ships dragged in by the tide, tree trunks encrusted with algae and shells, virgin white stripes of sand, and over there, sheltered by the rock, we can make out the remains of a “scientific civilization” (an old telescope on a tripod, a sextant, a few books, a mysterious locked chest; is it a treasure chest or merely a worn old box of props?). It might contain “theatre” or a magician’s tricks, tricks of a stage wizard or a wizard not of the stage. Who is this old man, then? Not merely a father, apparently, not merely a conductor who runs a show. Could he be a scientist, an astronomer, an explorer? Or is he a wizard? And if so, what kind? A wizard only in the theatre, or in the whole world? At this moment, in fact, he is tracing out mysterious signs in the air as he murmurs incomprehensible words, as he descends with the girl from the rock to the stage floor.