Four hundred years...
        ...since the Bermudas shipwreck that inspired Shakespeare's most strange and magical play,
           our new production sets out from the start to make a beautiful but notoriously challenging text accessible.

Without losing any of the poetry and wonder, mtp's The Tempest tells the story simply and clearly, offering a fresh take on themes of revenge and the use and abuse of power.

Music specially commissioned from BAFTA award winning composer Michael Jeffrey conjures up the sounds of the island and, in a haunting score for 'Where the bee sucks', echoes the seventeenth century setting attributed to Robert Johnson.

The production is set in a 1930s context and opens with newsreel footage: an airship bringing the royal party home has been brought down in a storm.

Throughout the play, a number of the survivors are seen only on film, as if Prospero were watching them via the agency of cameras set about the island.

His servant Caliban has dressed himself in cast-off items of clothing washed up from this and other wrecks, and a wireless, miraculously still working, provides dance music for the 'goddesses', who look suspiciously like a well-dressed pub landlady (Juno), a children's nanny (Ceres) and a landgirl (Iris).

 

For schools audiences:

A combined performance and workshop is available. Students are drawn into the action in role and, in a series of "what if?" sequences, are able to experience aspects of production at first hand and to explore different outcomes for a number of scenes in the play including:

• The villains' attempted murder of Alonso and Gonzalo
• The appearance (and disappearance) of the magical banquet
• Caliban's drunken plot with Trinculo and Stephano
• Miranda's first meeting with Ferdinand