The Tempest

Prospero has lost his charm: against the backdrop of today’s mass entertainments industry the magical powers of the solitary island ruler can arouse only a meagre pity. Shakespeare’s last play begins with a shipwreck, and in Stefan Pucher’s production this transpires to be no more than the “making of” documentary for a B movie. The director is unable to believe in the humanist pathos of sublime Prospero – as our view of the world today is always filtered through and coded by the media. Thus Prospero, acted by Hildegard Schmahl, lives out an impoverished existence as an unfulfilled upmarket zombie in the spirit of Count Dracula and the Count of Monte Christo, in a kind of post-colonial luxury lodge where he is waited upon by his rebellious slaves Caliban and Ariel. The Neapolitan experts of disaster seem to come straight out of a movie about the mafia and the two lovers, Miranda and Ferdinand, directly from the yellow press. Trinculo and Stephano seem to be tracing a bizarre path reminiscent of the eccentric British artists Gilbert & George, reliving one of their performances. The stage consists of enormous pages from a book that Pucher turns as if he were leafing through Shakespeare’s play, but one that has been transformed into a colourful pop-up volume on black pedagogy. With deep scepticism and an irony founded in melancholy he plays the fairy-teller of pop culture, narrating the profoundly sad story of a failed civilisation and creating an autonomous world of images in the process. It all amounts to a deeply witty and yet vulnerable robinsonade on the subject of the failed “possibility of an island” (Houellebecq).