Reflections After Shakespeare's The Tempest

Royal Shakespeare Company, March,2017 Everything you have heard is true: the story has a lovely princess too innocent even for a fairy world. It has a revenge fantasy, side by side with a utopian commonwealth; it has drunkenness and sobriety. Like all fairy stories, it has a monster at its center: but which character plays the monster? Should we fear that place, that magic island, because one man controls its storms and calms? Should we fear that man, old in scholarship, because he is a necromancer, or because he is a grievously wounded man? Should we fear a mere man with the power he claims to raise the dead back to life? Or is that just a poet's fancy, fading into thin air? Should we not rejoice instead because this place is so real? It has weight and presence, visible and invisible creatures bustle to and fro, amid music and fair weather. And witness the changing light of the stars above, intelligent stars that know our fates, and are not without kindness. If there are risks - No, that is not how I want to put this. Say instead: There is a desirable island you can only reach by a storm at sea; there must be a history of grief you carry within; there must be a willingness in you to make friends for life. But the hardest thing you must do alone: to read deeply in Prospero's book, and then throw it in a high arc into the sea, and watch it sink past touch, past vision, past any hope of retrieval. You must be able to summon Prospero's courage or be damned. It is the heart of all things that speaks. There is an island which could be paradise, where sweet music inhabits the air, like a living presence, and makes hearts swell with forgiveness. Are we not ready? Will you settle there with me?