[In the following review of the 2001 staging of The Tempest at the Almeida Theatre, Bates concentrates on the thematic material of reality, illusion, and disillusion that director Jonathan Kent put to use in his production.]

When The Tempest first appeared in 1611, its airborne spirits, chimerical banquet and various deae ex machina were the latest thing in Jacobean special effects. It has been a machine play ever since. In the eighteenth century, the storm scene was postponed to the beginning of Act Two, so that latecomers could catch what was evidently the highlight of the show. You might expect the modern director to make use of the latest theatrical hardware (or software), but Jonathan Kent's new production at the Almeida avoids such banalities. Forget illusionism. Here, the effects are for real. As if in sympathy with our sodden island, the stage is submerged beneath several feet of water, producing a sometimes bubbling, sometimes still, narcissan pool into which Aidan Gillen's amphibious Ariel uncomplainingly ducks and dives and around which the rest of the cast wetly splash and wade. The set brings to life all the mystery of the seashore, that ambiguous tideland that is neither completely land nor sea and which, lunar-like, appears and recedes in waves—a fitting place for Prospero's chiaroscuro magic, but not oversolemn either, the perfect setting also for the seaside vaudeville of Stephano and Trinculo. As for the storm scene—well, take your sou'-westers. This is not so much après as pendant le déluge.

Meanwhile, the theatre all around one is a wreck, and that is no illusion either. For the Almeida is in the process of being dismantled and, still in the early stages of an ambitious refurbishment programme, requires the audience to pick its way over tarpaulins and scaffolding rails into what is strictly, no doubt, a hardhat area. Drawing on a valedictory tradition which has, since the nineteenth century, persisted in seeing The Tempest as Shakespeare's farewell to the stage, the Almeida team have chosen it as the perfect play with which to bow out: “our revels now are ended”. As Prospero, Ian McDiarmid solemnly breaks his staff and abjures his theatrical magic on a stage that is about to go dark for twelve months in the interests (one wonders at what cost to atmosphere) of comfort-cooling and improved bar facilities.

The Tempest has always been a timely play. Time is embedded in the very title, and the word “now”, repeated some seventy-nine times in the course of the play, emphasizes the auspicious moment of Prospero's long-awaited seizure of the day. But the timeliness of this present production does more than just suit the occasion. Uniquely, it also tells us something new about the play. All Shakespeare's plays draw attention to their own artifice, and The Tempest—with its morbid interest in the power to conjure and deceive—more, perhaps, than any other. But in this production it is not only the illusion that is real (especially if you are sitting in the front row). The final breaking of the spell and return from illusion to reality—well, that is real too, for all around us the walls of the playwright's magic circle are all too visibly falling down. Illusion and reality are thus equally real, equally true to that datum of empirical philosophy: sense experience. In this respect, Kent is able to take the play further than most in developing the great Shakespearean theme that, in this stage-play-world of ours, illusion and reality are one. It is an opportunity that doesn't present itself too often, depending as it does on the physical disintegration of the company's most valuable asset, its real estate.

Why should this matter, particularly? Because it reminds us how, in normal circumstances, we keep illusion and reality apart. Yet a very particular and, if one thinks about it, negative attitude to art lies behind this habitual assumption: not only Freud's infamous view that art is essentially neurosis but, more fundamentally, a fastidious puritanism which goes back to Plato and which sees art as a fantasy shadowland, where the siren call of tricksy magic irresistibly charms the best away from the pristine, solar truth.

One wouldn't expect Shakespeare to share the philosopher-scientist's suspicion of art. But he doesn't quite turn the terms around either. Illusion, if not good, is at best mixed, and nowhere more so than in The Tempest, where play is as foul as it is fair and where Prospero is both Merlin and Morgan le Fay combined. Although some productions of the play have sentimentalized Prospero's art, this one happily refrains from doing so. Illusion-making isn't pretty. After all, everything goes wrong for Prospero, the moment he gives up the knockabout reality of Italian statecraft for the life of the mind. Deserting his dukedom for his books, Prospero joins a line of delinquent kings who cut a swathe through much of Renaissance literature. McDiarmid's Prospero is not so much the benign old gaffer of Gielgud mode as a kind of demented Jon Pertwee. Ariel, swathed in bandages from the waist up, is, like Frankenstein's monster, visibly the creation of a mad scientist's brain. Malcolm Storry's show-stealing Caliban—rutting and roaring appropriately—is a libidinous degenerate dressed in the garments of a nineteenth-century madhouse. And Ann Livia Ryan's Miranda—incomprehensibly hysterical at first—makes sense as the all-too-easily hypnotizable patient whose problems are, as with all the best neurotics, to be cured by a husband and marriage. With a supporting cast such as this, Prospero emerges more as a mad doctor, whose island is a bedlam and whose fantasy goes far beyond even the wildest of Freud's imaginings—the power to control other people's dreams.

At the same time, however, the playwright is undoubtedly controlling our dream. With his ability to create worlds out of nowhere and to fashion whole fields of experience, the playwright can do as he likes; illusion is all that we know. And it is presumably to emphasize this creative power that, at precisely the point when Prospero comes into his own as a true dramaturge—presenting his masque of goddesses to Ferdinand and Miranda—this production suddenly becomes hallucinatory. All the gestures towards making things real now move, for a spell, in the opposite direction. Where the Jacobeans would have wheeled in their clanking machinery, what this production chooses to give us is the most insubstantial pageant of all: the phantasmagoric images of cinematic projection. The too, too solid goddesses of masque convention here melt away, to be projected instead on to a sky-blue muslin screen, the flimsy surface of which very suitably becomes the baseless fabric of Prospero's vision. Juno, Ceres and Iris are not only disembodied; they don't speak and are not even female. Their mirage-like apparitions are played by boys, and their fleeting appearance glimmers to the strains of a boys' choir wafting cherubically from above. If this is the dramatist's art exemplified, then it is about as illusory as you can get. As we sit behind Ferdinand and Miranda, watching with them the flickering shadows on the opposite wall, we remember exactly where we are: Prospero's cell has become Plato's Cave.

In most productions of the play, the final nunc dimittis of Prospero's epilogue sends us back out into a concrete and brightly lit world where our sense of reality is duly restored. But, played as it is in a collapsing theatre, this clever Tempest opportunely suggests that there is nowhere different out there for us to go. Since it puts illusion and reality on the same plane, it honours Shakespeare's art by inviting us to redraw the lines. For Plato and Freud, the opposite of illusion is what is real; but, for the artist, the opposite of illusion is disillusion. And if, as this production suggests, it is disillusion and not reality that lies outside the magic circle, then it's all right to fantasize and to make art, perfectly acceptable for reality to be the stuff of dreams.