Covent Garden Revives Thomas Adès's The Tempest

When the Royal Opera House in London presented Thomas Adès's The Tempest in 2004, it was one of the most successful world premieres of an opera in years. The entire run sold out; the reviews ranged from respectful and encouraging (at their worst) to downright thrilled; audience reaction was ecstatic. Now the Royal Opera is presenting a revival of The Tempest.

The Tempest's encore run opened on Monday night (March 12); there are further performances tomorrow evening and on March 17, 20, 23 and 26. Details are available at www.royaloperahouse.org.
www.playbillarts.com/news/article/6160.html

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No reading of The Tempest can do it justice: Shakespeare's tale of Prospero's Island is inherently theatrical, unfolding in a series of spectacles that involve exotic, supra-human, and sometimes invisible characters that the audience can see but other characters cannot. The play was composed by Shakespeare as a multi-sensory theater experience, with sound, and especially music, used to complement the sights of the play, and all of it interwoven by the author with lyrical textual passages that overflow with exotic images, trifling sounds, and a palpable lushness.

The richness of The Tempest as theater is matched by the extraordinary thematic complexity of its text. Recognizing that all of the themes and accompanying figurative strands of the play cannot be discussed here, the play's topical highlights can still be approached by first noting the salience of two themes that arise from the very theatricality of the play: the opposition between reality and illusion and the tandem subject of the theater itself. The play challenges our senses and is self-consciously a performance orchestrated by Shakespeare's effigy in the master illusionist Prospero. There are, in addition, numerous interpenetrating polarities in the play, most notably between nature and civilization or Art. These thematic strands come together at multiple points of intersection.

Nevertheless, from one angle on the text, The Tempest asks a single question, one that Shakespeare had posed in many and divers of his other plays: What is a human being? (or, in Elizabethan terms: What is man?)

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