CINEMA: Shaun de Waal
PREPARE yourself for a visual experience unlike anything you have ever seen — Shakespeare for the multi-media age. And if you were repelled by Peter Greenaway’s last film to be released here, The Cook, the Thief, His Wife and Her Lover, don’t worry: there’s nothing bilious-making in Prospero’s Books, his adaptation of The Tempest. This one really is a feast.
The point of departure is a couple of lines in the play telling us that when Prospero, exiled duke of Milan, was deposed and set adrift by his treacherous brother Antonio, a kind courtier let him take some of his library with him. Descriptions and depictions of these fantastical books are then woven into the story of The Tempest, which begins with Prospero, renaissance man and magus, now lording it over a tiny island, magically whipping up a storm to shipwreck Antonio and others there so he can take his revenge.
John Gielgud plays Prospero, and he speaks almost all the lines — showing how total is his mastery over this realm; he gives up this power only when he chooses. He has already enslaved its demons and sprites and created innumerable servitors for himself, and this is his fantasy of vengeance being played out, meticulously stage-managed. But this strategy also creates an identification of Prospero the arch-manipulator with Shakespeare himself, as the author of the play, and thus too with Greenaway, the auteur of this new text. Apart from the symbolic value of this, we get the chance to hear the extraordinary Gielgud voice, in all its virtuosic modulations, for most of the film.
Greenaway’s version of The Tempest, other than these twists, is pretty conventional. He is not, for instance, interested in the idea — used creatively in some stagings — of turning it into a fable of colonialism, with Prospero himself a usurper and Caliban and Ariel the trampled-upon indigenes. He gives us the play more-or-less straight, for, as with most of his films, the plot is really an excuse for Greenaway to create a ravishing cinematic artefact that exists almost entirely on its own terms, a world as self- contained as any of Prospero’s conjurations.
Greenaway is already a master of overwhelming spectacle and visual extravagance. Here, thanks to the latest computer and high-definition television technology, he can go further than he has ever gone before. Using the graphics program Paintbox and the Japanese Hi-Vision capability, he creates a screen within the screen, superimposing and interweaving images with breathtaking inventiveness. He brings Prospero’s wizardly books to life, literally — the illustrations begin to move, the diagrammes fold out into real architectures, and so on. The film, too, is filled with textuality — whether written or printed — but it is less a transparent transmitter of meaning than another visual element, another layer in the palimpsest of the film. The final effect of all this, something undeniably rich and strange, is practically impossible to describe — it has to be seen to be believed, and on a big screen.
But there are drawbacks to the emphasis on the visual over the dramatic. Greenaway doesn’t try to humanise these characters; they are “demi-puppets” in a larger, pre- determined schema. So some of the impact of the clash between Prospero and Caliban is lost — how can we doubt Prospero is invincible? And the clash of emotions between Prospero and his daughter, Miranda, leaves the viewer unmoved. Moreover, given the measured pace of the film, Gielgud is not allowed to expose Prospero in all his mercurial megalomania.
In places, though, where Greenaway has declined to take Shakespeare literally, it works brilliantly. Caliban, for instance, is no deformed monster. Here, he is “honoured with a human shape” — one given a powerful, virile physicality by choreographer-dancer Michael Clark (no wonder he so fascinates Miranda). Prospero may be the sole possessor of a voice for most of the film, but Caliban speaks with his body.
This, and Prospero’s Books as a whole, exemplifies the “art to enchant” that Shakespeare sought; Greenaway’s film is a pageant of dreams.