Five years and nine productions after their first staging of ‘The Tempest’, award-nominated theatre company Brave Mirror return with a new version of their maiden show, and Shakespeare’s final masterpiece running from April 24 – April 26 at the Cockpit Theatre. A Youngish Perspective holds this exclusive conversation with the artistic director of Brave Mirror -Jamie Saul.
How does your adaptation of The Tempest reframe Prospero’s journey through a female lens, and what new perspectives does this bring to the narrative?
I met Sarah, the actor who’s playing Prospero, through Directors Cut Theatre Company, which is a group of writers, actors and directors that come together to create shows and showcases. I met Sarah doing one of those shows and immediately thought she should play Prospero.
The idea for this iteration on The Tempest had been in my head for a while, so when I met her I thought ‘yes, this works!’ and that was a really exciting moment.
And she was really keen! She wanted to make Prospero a mother especially, which I thought was fascinating, and is probably for Sarah to talk about that rather than me. But, I loved that perspective and I loved that angle on the story because it generates so many ‘what ifs?’ What if Prospero as a parent is a mum, not a dad? What does that do? What if she’s been a single mum trapped on this island, rather than a single father? What if she was a female political leader who was cast out of the government that she was leading rather than a male leader? What does that do? I want the show to ask these questions rather than answer them. Part of the process of staging Shakespeare plays now is trying to mine the original scripts for new things and new interesting bits and this felt like it brought something new to it. Obviously, we’re not the first people to do this, Harriet Walter was stunning as Prospero in Phyllida Lloyd’s production and that was just brilliant and beautiful and added so much to that script and that story. But I think we’re taking it in a slightly different direction.
With The Tempest: This Island being Brave Mirror’s largest project to date, how have you approached scaling up while maintaining the company’s core values of sustainability and collaboration?
I think it’s important to acknowledge that this isn’t the largest possible version of this project, we applied a number of times for Arts Council funding and didn’t get it. We wanted to do a lot of work with sustainability and integrating The Theatre Green Book (TGB) into a small scale production and thinking about what that looks like and what that can add to the the theatre industry. What does TGB look like working in smaller scale and fringe theatre, and working with education leaders as well, to add a foundation to the start of people’s careers, thinking about sustainability. Unfortunately, we didn’t get the funding, so we’ve not been able to do that for this project, but we will for something, one day.
All that to say, this is still our largest project to date. It’s our largest venue, it’s will hopefully *laughs* be our largest audience. And that’s felt like a really natural progression. We’ve never had to think about how are we maintaining our values of sustainability and collaboration. I don’t know how we’d work otherwise.
I’ve been thinking a lot about what it means to collaborate during this process, and been trying to learn a lot about what it is to lead and guide a team and then launch them into a show that I’m ultimately handing over to them. It is theirs more so than it is mine. And that feels collaborative, and it feels interesting. That’s been one of the driving factors for me in this project. But I don’t think I can make something that isn’t sustainable and isn’t collaborative. Those are vital things for me, because my brain, and no one’s brain, is better than the collective brain that we all bring. We all bring our specialisms and our expertises and we as a people have to learn how to make things in a more sustainable way. Both of those things are essential.
The play explores the control leaders exert and stories they create. How does the theme resonate in today’s world, and what message do you hope audiences take away?
Again, it’s interesting, the word message, isn’t it? I want the audience to go away talking and with loads of questions. I don’t know if I necessarily want them to go away with a message, that’s wrong. I think that this theme resonates in today’s world, just as it did 400 years ago, when Shakespeare wrote this for the first time. There are always leaders who are trying to tell a story. I, as the leader of this process am trying to tell a story to the people involved. I’m trying to tell you a story now as I’m answering these questions. And that’s not to compare myself to Prospero, or the great figures of politics. What I’m trying to say is everyone at every level of their lives, I think is telling a story.
Prospero is doing that in quite a macro way, I suppose, but also in quite a micro way. It’s all about her life and how she’s been wronged and what happened to her. There’s a tension between the macro and the micro of that. She was a great political figure in Milan where she was removed from, and as the leader, she had consequence and agency over people. We’re trying to ask whether that rings true of people now. The person we’ve been talking about, maybe this is obvious and boring, but it’s true, is Trump. I sort of hate that we’ve talked about him a lot, but we have. He’s very good at telling a big story. I think we need to acknowledge that he’s good at that, whether we like him or not. *laughs* I don’t, we don’t, I think that’s important to make clear. He’s good at that storytelling and he’s done what Prospero does. He inspired an insurrection in 2021 and then he was cast off into the wilderness and he came back. That’s what Prospero does. You don’t have the micro so much with him – we don’t see the dynamics of his family and all of that. Trump as a person I think resonates loads with Prospero, but we’re trying to make Prospero more of a human figure. That’s why we’re thinking about her as a mother and her personal relationships with other people that extend beyond the political versions of those relationships. We only think of Trump as a father with his children when they are being political figures. I think that’s why something like Succession is so interesting, because you see the personal and the private as well as the large, macro-scale, public, and that’s what we’re trying to do.
What challenges did you face in blending Shakespeare’s original text with new elements of magic, music and interrogation of power?
None of those are new, they’re all there! We’ve not brought that much new to it *laughs* – you can’t, can you? It’s all brilliant. Shakespeare gives you all these brilliant tools, ideas, things, and all these alleyways that you don’t know where they lead. Then you have to find the ending to them, or certainly the next step of them. That’s the brilliance of working with something that’s so storied and such a brilliant story. We have majorly cut the text – I keep saying to people, it’s a 90-minute joyride through this brilliant story. It’s a cut down and condensed version with a few changes and a few surprises. So the challenge has been honouring the original text while trying to create something completely new. And that has been a challenge. We’ve R&D’d it and developed it, it’s been mulling in my brain and other people’s brains for a couple of years now, so we’ve been trying to work out what that is and how to best serve The Story that Shakespeare gave us, while also creating our own story.
As a returning production five years after your first version of The Tempest, how has your vision evolved and what creative risks have you taken this time?
It’s got loads bigger and that’s probably been a pain for a lot of people involved but also, I think that’s what you’ve got to do! We’re working at the edges of what we can with our budget and our knowledge and our expertise and our creativity and all of that. And that’s hugely exciting. That is why we do what we do, and continue to do so – to challenge ourselves and find the joy in that.
How is the vision evolved? Weirdly, the vision is similar I think. What has changed is that I’ve learnt more about how I wanted to tell this story. This is probably how I wanted to tell the story five years ago, but I didn’t know how to do that then.
And I, you know I’m always struck by this, I know what I think about it now, and I knew what I thought about it five years ago. Neither of them are right – they’re just true at the time, aren’t they? I guess that’s why theatre is brilliant, cause it’s only true at the time and only exists at the time.
Something that is different is that we’ve not cast an actor to play Ariel – so you can come and see how we play with that character within this version. We’ve been thinking a lot about these characters that exist on the island with Prospero, the less defined characters maybe you’d say. So that’s Ariel, and Caliban as well. With Caliban, we’ve been thinking about the modern definition of a monster. In this version of the play, one that’s thinking about theatricality, performance and storytelling, how does a monster sit within that? And maybe it’s just a man?
How do you balance honouring Shakespeare’s text while making space for Brave Mirror’s signature style and contemporary voice?
With the intention of care, maybe you won’t think there has been much *laughs*. But there’s been the intention of it, definitely. I’ve chopped it up, loads, which I think is hopefully exciting and keeps you guessing, not knowing exactly what’s next. I was really inspired by The Other Place, which was on at The National Theatre last year, which I think was brilliant and it did loads of new things to Antigone while honouring what it was, and saying ‘this is what it was then’ and ‘this is what it can be now.’ I was really inspired by that. We’ve not changed the language from Shakespeare’s text, and that was a question we started with – we thought we might do that, but we haven’t ended up doing so.
I think a lot of my work was just figuring out what the big things it’s saying are and then thinking about how we want to articulate that. I think it’s really easy to get bogged down in the academia of a project, especially with a Shakespeare project and especially a renewal of the Shakespeare. It’s really easy to be thinking about the themes and all the beautiful language and analysing it all. I’ve had to be quite harsh with the actors, about that and asking them to divorce themselves from that expectation and impulse. I think sometimes we use that and twist ourselves up in knots a little bit, it’s sort of too big for us to hold all of the things that Shakespeare’s doing and all of the different potentials in it, all those brilliant alleys that lead to places that you could go. You’ve got to pick a couple. So we’ve been trying to think about what’s the best story that we can invite people to come and watch for 90-minutes of their day, for £17 or £13, what does that look like?
For tickets and more info about the production, please visit https://tickets.thecockpit.org.uk/sales/shows/the-tempest-this-island