RM2014 Publicity
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Is there anything older than the story of civilized folk trapped on a desert island? This particular telling of this age-old tale centres around a loving yet strangely indifferent father whose powers are failing him, his fantastically nasty dogsbody of a spirit helper, his estranged daughter and her several alter-egos, and last and (too often) least, a colonized son/brother — the island’s only indigenous inhabitant — who has yet to figure out the rules governing the master race’s notions of “civil conversation.” Sound familiar? Rougher Magic: A cubist Shakespeare, is written through as much as around Shakespeare’s The Tempest. Using one of the Bard’s final plays as the source for a stunningly original story, Rougher Magic, is a funny and moving ‘deconstruction’ of the various ways in which The Tempest – that extended meditation on the inevitability of death – constructs race and gender. Robert Moore’s Rougher Magic, directed by fellow Shadow co-founder, Scott Shannon, and performed by a tribe of veteran ‘Nasties,’ offers an unforgettable theatrical adventure for cast and audience alike. WARNING: This show contains wildly loose (possibly offensive?) language and subject matter — use your imagination! ~ 2 CITIES / 4 FEATURED FRIDAYS!!! ~ FREDERICTON: SAINT JOHN: Tickets available at the door: $10/person – REVIEW: FEB 2000 PRODUCTION – |
It is with extreme (albeit sorrowful) gratitude that we announce the following gift of funding, in memory our friend and unseen Shadow, Andrew Jones …
– REVIEW: FEB 2000 PRODUCTION –
– REVIEW: SEPT 2004 PRODUCTION (A Nasty/Notable production) –
ARCHIVED REVIEW: FEBRUARY 2000
Staged in February 2000 @ Memorial Hall, UNB, Fredericton, NB
Staged in February 2000 @ SJHS Little Theatre, Saint John, NB
CAST/CREW
Prospero – Christopher Stacey
Caliban – Scott Shannon
Miranda #1 – Crystal Lee (Fredericton run)
Miranda #1 – Debbie Gray (Saint John run)
Miranda #2 – Marissa Allison
Miranda #3 – Andrew Jones
Ariel – David Thorne
Ferdinand – Matty Warnock
Director – Robert Moore
Technical Director – Gerry Briggs
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REVIEW:
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Rougher Magic weaves age-old intrigue:
Shakespearean classic The Tempest given new adaptation
Rougher Magic poster
The Daily Gleaner (Fredericton)
Friday, February 11, 2000
Byline: Richard Anderson
Length: 673 words
Nasty Shadows Theatre Company opened a three-day run of Rougher Magic at Memorial Hall, UNB, last night. It was an ambitious play with a clever script packed with literary references, some really meaty roles, and tightly-coordinated sound and lighting effects.
Director and playwright Robert Moore and his cast brought it off with panache. The title itself is a reference to Prospero’s speech in Act 5, near the end of Shakespeare’s The Tempest, where he renounces the “rough magic” given him by the spirit Ariel, that allowed him to rule the island upon which he, his daughter Miranda, and others were shipwrecked by a storm.
Certainly, the use of the title Rougher Magic implies deference to the genius of “The Bard.” But Moore’s script, a reworking of The Tempest, is intriguing. Shakespeare’s cast is pared down to Prospero, Miranda and the monster/slave Caliban, with Ariel and Ferdinand, Miranda’s suitor, in supplemental roles.
Instead of Prospero driving the action, with the assistance of Ariel and his magic, Moore gives us Caliban and Miranda as the chief protagonists, playing off each other and Prospero.
Miranda is played by three actors, adding lots of depth and perspective to the role. The playbill, incidentally, has the rather apt, unattributed quote, “a cubist Shakespeare,” which is literally true in the case of this three- dimensional character. And staging the play in the round on the main floor of Memorial Hall, with son et lumiere effects closely building and reinforcing the mood of the action, is very effective. Also, when not called on to deliver lines, actors mingled with the play-goers, and circulated around the floor, creating a definite sense of involvement in the audience.
Scott Shannon as ‘Caliban’ during rehearsals c.February 2000
Scott Shannon created a kind of “punk” Caliban by turns submissive and suffering; bitter and sarcastic; sullen and angry; malevolent and evil; and cajoling, lusty and frustrated. He was wonderfully supple in shifting from mood to mood, in a role responsible for much of the dramatic tension in the play.
Chris Stacey, as the island ruler and tyrant Prospero, propelled his character smoothly from initial world-weariness, through sarcastic and angry confrontations, mainly with his slave and his daughter, to a somewhat rueful acknowledgment of his baleful influence on them, as he prepares to leave the island.
The idea of having three Mirandas worked really well. Of the three, Miranda No. 2, Marissa Allison, had the most to do. Wearing a pink, frilly dress, she was the troubled teen, mostly focused on getting her freedom, sometimes deferring to “Daddy,” and sexually taunting the frustrated Caliban.
The interaction between these two conveyed particularly strong emotions, especially in the scene where Miranda narrates and acts out her dream of being followed by the slave. Allison even delivered a passage in passable German which however, this reviewer understood very imperfectly.
Miranda No. 1, Crystal Lee, acted a petulant young girl, still playing with dolls, yet attracted to Ferdinand, her suitor, largely from a desire for freedom from her somewhat overbearing father. She was good at portraying the high spirits and fears of a child.
Andrew Jones honoured the traditions of Shakespeare’s day, by playing a woman, donning a skirt, blouse and wig to portray Miranda No. 3. His Miranda was an older, more callous woman, contemptuous of Caliban’s approaches.
David Thorne played Prospero’s assistant, the spirit Ariel. But in Moore’s version, Ariel is definitely out of synch with his master. In fact it was hard to see what was driving this louche character, which was the least successful of the seven in the script. Thorne nevertheless, gave it a good try. He put lots of expression into the role, imparting a kind of uncaring nonchalance that certainly contrasted with Prospero’s serious and sometimes frightening intensity.
Matty Warnock played Miranda’s suitor Ferdinand, and was not only costumed as an Elizabethan (as was Thorne), but acted the part too, adopting a declamatory turn of speech that suited his rather foppish character.
Rougher Magic continues tonight and Saturday night, in Memorial Hall, UNB, at 8 p.m., and is well worth taking in.
© 2000 The Daily Gleaner (Fredericton)
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ARCHIVED REVIEW: SEPTEMBER 2004
MO(O)RE MAGIC …
Although it was not a true Nasty Shadows production, the play was remounted by some
Nasty Shadows through NBActs as a festival Fall offering in 2004
Staged in September 2004 @ Black Box, STU, Fredericton, NB
CAST/CREW
Prospero – Scott Shannon
Caliban – Len Falkenstein
Miranda #1 – Marissa Allison
Miranda #2 – Andrew Jones
Miranda #3 – Chelsea Seale
Ariel – Seann Murray
Ferdinand – Nicholas Cole
Director – Scott Shannon
Technical support provided by NBActs
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– REVIEW –
– SEPTEMBER 2004 –
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Robert Moore
ROUGHER MAGIC
by Robert Moore
Notable Acts (w/Nasty Shadows)
September 29 – October 2, 2004
It’s been a long time since I’ve watched the good old Top Poet, Wm. Shaksper, get tripped up at the heels, held upside down and slapped awake. Perhaps as long ago as seeing one of those Charles Marowitz travesties from the eighties — say, his upending of The Taming of the Shrew — or Tom Stoppard at his scandalous best, as in Dogg’s Hamlet, Cahoot’s Macbeth.
But Robert Moore‘s Rougher Magic does a pretty fair job of reminding us that just because it’s Shakespeare, it’s not necessarily in tune with all our most deeply cherished modern values. As Adam Gopnik pointed out a few weeks ago in the New Yorker, there really is no way short of text tampering to make The Taming of the Shrew into a feminist play, or The Merchant of Venice into a pro-Semitic one. Shakespeare was, after all, an Elizabethan. And, as Moore makes clear, no matter how hard you shake The Tempest, without some fundamental change it’s never going to be the sort of thing a member of an uprooted, displaced indigenous people is going to be comfortable with.
At the end of a couple of hours’ worth of startling, athletic, imaginative and colorful messing about with Shakespeare’s last play (as well as a fair number of other plays by the master, and an eclectic selection of different dramatic conventions), it’s not really a surprise that it’s Caliban, not Prospero, who gets the big speech about cloud-capped towers and insubstantial pageants leaving not a wrack behind. Whatever the play has failed to make clear — and there’s quite a lot, amid all the ebullience, speed-talk, mime, parody and acrobatics — it’s brought us to see that when Prospero “colonized” the enchanted island and educated and/or enslaved Caliban, he wreaked havoc that can’t be unwreaked. One of the most powerful moments in the play occurs when Caliban (played wonderfully by a shaven-headed and artistically war-painted Len Falkenstein) explains to Prospero that just leaving when his business is done, which is of course what happens in Shakespeare’s version, isn’t in the cards. Nor is Prospero’s asking for forgiveness going to cut much mustard. No, Caliban says (and one can hear the voice of indigenous peoples all over the world), this is not my home any more. You can’t just walk away. You’ve not only changed the land, you’ve changed me so that I don’t belong here any more — your language, your words, have come between me and the mud and the trees, and even the stars. “You are the monster on this isle.” “I’ll keep you here to shit on everything you’ve ever tried to do.”
Much that leads to this conclusion is wonderful, and a good bit is pretty difficult to get your head around on a first viewing. Although Moore pares The Tempest down to its bare essentials — Caliban, Ariel, Prospero, Miranda, and Ferdinand — he doesn’t leave it bare. He adds in a whole lot of baroque and often tasty spice.
For instance, there’s an adventurous parody of the Caliban-Trinculo-Stephano monster scene, with Ariel and Ferdinand somehow become the two drunken mariners. There’s a spooky and oddly moving dumbshow, with masks, of the childbirth death of Miranda’s mother. Miranda and Ariel have a wonderful verbal tennis match, swapping lines and scraps of characterization from various Shakespeare plays back and forth at each other, standing right up to the net for volley after volley, testing the skill, speed and timing of veteran Marissa Robinson and relative newcomer Seann Murray (both achieve sparkle and clarity and force without breaking into a sweat). What it was all about I wasn’t so clear on (for instance, why does Miranda deliver the “tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow” speech from Macbeth in German?), but as a display of thespian pyrotechnics it was just fine. There’s all kinds of wordplay and stylistic crosscutting between Shakespeare’s language and the most current kind of casual conversational language, throughout the play. We don’t get “O brave new world, that has such creatures in it”; we get “we don’t get many strangers around here.”
And, for good measure, Miranda’s played by three actors. Andrew Jones in drag is an older, dourer Miranda, and Chelsea Seale is a younger, more innocent Miranda, with her Barbie and Ken dolls and her instant teenybopper infatuation with Ferdinand. Both were solid, clear and consistent. Marissa Robinson, as the aspect of Miranda in the most intense love/hate relationship with Caliban, was, as always, vivid, disciplined and magnetic. I especially liked the scene in which she tantalizingly educates Caliban in “polite conversation” like a dominatrix schoolmarm, and the compelling dream narrative with which she torments him, at Prospero’s instigation.
The role of Prospero is a challenge, no less than in the original, but for different reasons. This Prospero takes up the parts of Shakespeare’s character that are defeated and tired and ready to break his staff, drown his book, and retire to his garden. Scott Shannon, who also directed, creates a sympathetic, human figure, and if his exposition wasn’t always as clearly projected as I’d have liked, especially toward the beginning, he made us believe that he truly would like to undo what has happened to the Island. He is, we realize, after all, us (the enemy, as Pogo used to remind us, we have met).
Caliban and Ariel are among Shakespeare’s most challenging creations, and they’re the sort of roles actors jump at. Moore’s versions are similarly challenging, and Falkenstein and Murray create images, lines and scenes that will stay a long time in my store of memorable theatrical moments. For instance, Murray’s Ariel, acrobatically charging about the stage as though on the verge of flying, with his startling white face makeup and spiked hair, and leaping into the dark on an exit line: “Cue the animal act.” Instantly, out of the darkness behind me, the roar of the feral, suddenly spotlit Caliban, thundering down the aisle to tell us that this is his place, that he is part of the island’s mud and blood.
There are many such moments in the production. Nicholas Cole‘s Ferdinand, with his Shakespearean prancing and skipping; Andrew Jones‘s Miranda shamefacedly wiping off his lipstick when daddy sees what she’s doing; the three Mirandas from the tops of the aisles on three sides of the stage, contrapuntally wondering how long she’s been on the island.
Is it all relevant? Is everything necessary? Does it all add neatly up to the dead Prospero — Caliban’s pointless but inevitable destruction of the person who had been his God? I’m not certain: I’d be happy to read the script and see the production again, as I have faith there are connections I missed. It’s probably that faith, generated by the sheer force of the passion behind the script and the production, that made me much less concious of some issues that would usually bother me — for instance, what was the convention about the actors sitting around waiting? Were they in character or out? Was this a show put on by actors or a series of shows put on by characters? Was the theatre in the round setting really used very effectively? (Sometimes it seemed to me that the placement of actors presumed that there was one real direction of the play, and people on the other side were left out.) The lighting was wonderfully timed and dramatic, but it seemed to me to be used in different ways at different times. Sometimes there was music, sometimes there wasn’t (and though I very much liked the faint, delicate bird twitterings toward the end, they seemed to me a quite different sort of convention than we’d seen before).
But in the last analysis, all this didn’t seem to matter much. As an evening of theatre that sends you out changed from what you were going in, Moore’s Magic, rough as it is, is up there with the most powerful Shakespeare demolitions I’ve encountered.
REVIEW BY RUSS HUNT
ORIGINALLY POSTED: http://www.stu.ca/~hunt/reviews/rougher.htm
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