Helen Mirren's excellent version of The Tempest was released in 2010. That was unfortunate. It eclipsed this more beautiful production of The Tempest, by the Stratford Shakespeare Festival, with Christopher Plummer as Prospero.
Mirren's version of The Tempest is a pure movie, with lots of whirling landscapes, maybe too much landscape. Christopher Plummer's version combines two live, stage performances in diorama before audiences the size of landscapes.
Shakespeare's last play has been distorted and bungled with literary and social theories for decades. Postcolonial theorists have tried to portray The Tempest as a meditation on colonial exploitation. That's nonsense and most scholars now agree with me. If you want to make a play to fit into your pet theory, you can do it. It just won't be the play any longer.
"How about this?" the director and producer may have asked. "We put all that literary theory in a sack by the dumpster out back and just film a truly great version of The Tempest."
So they made this 2010 version of The Tempest, the best of countless performances I've seen, certainly better than the excellent BBC version or others available online.
It's the best version now available, in my opinion, because the acting, stagecraft, set design, direction, and intentions are the best.
A hilarious, kind, beautiful, masterpiece that will bring tears to your eyes. Plummer is funny, warm, clever, eloquent, and witty. Trish Lindström, as Miranda, is strong willed and loving, perfectly cast. Ariel as portrayed by Julyana Soelistyo is the best of all Ariels, strange but not off-putting or weird. Caliban is true to Shakespeare's description, not a "symbol of oppression," but as the half-fish son of the cruel witch exiled from Algiers, Sycorax. This perfect-timing Trinculo is a rib-tickling, laugh-out-loud, guilelessly drunken, bewitched wanderer.
In this production, all the characters are more vulnerable than angry. That fits a play concerned with renouncing power and embracing love and forgiveness.
This Tempest is a laugh riot that will also make you cry with joy. It's a piece of wisdom-teaching that will bathe you in beautiful words, colors, and sounds. At the end you'll probably be clapping with rest of the gigantic audience. Maybe shed a tear or two in joy.
