At the Stratford Festival, Forgiveness Is a Power Move

The day I saw 'The Tempest' at the Stratford Festival in Stratford, Ontario, there was a ferocious storm. We saw it coming. All afternoon, phones buzzed with various alarms — 'tornado likely,' these said. 'Dangerous winds.' The thunderstorm raged across the Canadian province north of Lake Ontario (which my digital map was calling Lake America because of a recent executive order from President Trump), and it wound up being a wildly destructive juggernaut. Still, the real storm faced stiff competition from a pretend one that night at the Festival Theater. 'The Tempest' starts with a shipwreck, and Antoni Cimolino's production begins with a series of lightning-fast transformations: First, in a shrieking gale, a ship's massive sail billows over the entire stage, only to crash to the floor, where its gray silk becomes a hurricane-whipped sea. Men fall from the ship's rigging and are flung into the dark; 'Hell is empty, and all the devils are here!' one screams. And then, whoosh, the cyclone tidies itself away. The sea-silk slips into a crevice in the floor and disappears, taking its trash (ropes, ship's wheel, weeping sailors) with it. Whatever else ensues in 'The Tempest,' the audience remembers this magically abrupt calm: Clearly the duke-turned-wizard, Prospero (played by the festival linchpin Geraint Wyn Davies), created this terrifying chaos just to restore order. Some of the men on that ship were Prospero's enemies. One is his evil brother, Antonio (Gordon S. Miller), who usurped his dukedom, so he has commanded his servant-spirit, Ariel (Marissa Orjalo), to torment them. According to Shakespeare, Prospero does enjoy his revenge. Ariel must remind his master to let his sympathies respond as his victims suffer: 'Mine would, sir, were I human,' Ariel says. Wyn Davies, though, has the kind of face that's always falling into a smile. He downplays Prospero's rancor and emphasizes his sweetness instead. This Prospero yearns, often in the face of continuing betrayal, to be kind. Want all of The Times? Subscribe.