Sam Jordison 

The Tempest casts strange spells at the cinema

Shakespeare's plays have inspired a vast number of films, but Prospero's story is behind some of the oddest – and richest
  
  

Prospero's Books
Inexplicable fascination … John Gielgud in Peter Greenaway's Prospero's Books (1991). Photograph: Sportsphoto Ltd. / Allstar Photograph: Sportsphoto Ltd. / Allstar

So far there have been more than 400 film adaptations of Shakespeare – that's more than any other author. There have been plenty of successes and even a few triumphs, but anyone who's laughed at, felt enraged by and fallen asleep during Laurence Olivier, Derek Jaocbi and Mel Gibson's variously awful attempts at Hamlet, for instance, will know all varieties of actors and directorial approaches can fail to make Shakespeare work on the screen.

Not that that stops people from trying. The pitfalls are many – but for plenty of actors, the rewards are far greater. One of the most famous stories of determination to appear in a cinematic version of Shakespeare has to be John Gielgud's long campaign to play Prospero. He was the acknowledged master of the role on the stage (first playing the role in 1930 and taking up the magicians's staff on numerous other occasions during his 70-year career). But he craved celluloid immortality for his greatest role. At various points it seemed as though he had persuaded Alain Resnais, Ingmar Bergman, Akira Kurosawa, and Orson Welles to direct. The latter was only put off when funding collapsed following the failure of another of his Shakespeare projects, Chimes at Midgnight. Gielgud had to wait until 1991, when he was 87, until he was finally given a chance to play the ageing wizard in Peter Greenaway's Prospero's Books. I can only assume that the resulting film wasn't quite what the actor originally had in mind.

This film, which I watched last week, is extraordinary. I've rarely been so baffled so quickly. Why, I wanted to know, within seconds of the opening, is John Gielgud in a pool? Where are his clothes? Why is that little boy weeing from a swing? Where are his clothes? Who are all these other people? Where are their clothes? More questions followed as Gielgud recited pretty much the whole script by himself, surrounded by naked actors performing ridiculous modern dance routines. Many more questions – and very few answers. Most particularly, it made me question the very nature of filmmaking itself. What do you want from a movie? If you want entertainment, coherence, conflict, resolution, drama, emotional connection, or anything at all that makes sense in a conventional way, you're onto a loser with Prospero's Books. It's a cold, incoherent and often silly film.

Jonathan Rosenbaum in the Chicago Reader gives an expert summary of its lack of appeal:

"Gone is any sense of drama or character; the cluttered spectacle yields no overriding design but simply disconnected MTV-like conceits or mini-ideas every three seconds … On the other hand, if you share Greenaway's misanthropy, you might get some kicks out of watching a cherub piss on everyone in sight."

And yet, there's something special about this absurd spectacle. There are worse things, after all, than listening to John Gielgud recite Shakespeare (even if Greenaway has an annoying tendency to distort his voice to the extent that it's almost incomprehensible). The film is also enjoyable as a series of beautifully photographed moments: strange and expensive revolving and evolving wallpaper. Roger Ebert, as usual, described it wonderfully:

"Prospero's Books really exists outside criticism. All I can do is describe it. Most of the reviews of this film have missed the point; this is not a narrative, it need not make sense, and it is not "too difficult" because it could not have been any less so. It is simply a work of original art, which Greenaway asks us to accept or reject on his own terms."

I couldn't help but admire the extravagance and strangeness of Greenaway's vision – not to mention the fact that he managed to raise the money to create this singularly pretentious and uncompromising work of art. I'd love to have been present at his pitching meetings: "We've got Gielgud in the water tank, with toy boats, he does all the voices and you can't always hear him and he's writing the film as he speaks and there are lots of pictures of books and there's modern dance, so much modern dance, and urine, and none of it makes sense, but there are naked people … " I imagine it was the latter that made it a viable proposition. It's boring, of course, but once I'd worked out that I wouldn't lose much by reading the paper while half keeping an eye on the screen I began to appreciate its strange beauty. I don't want to see it again - but I am glad it exists.

In fact, in spite of everything – or maybe because of everything – I took more from Greenaway's adaptation than I did from the next version I watched, Julie Taymor's film from 2010. This is a far more straightforward rendition of The Tempest, but for the fact that Prospero becomes Prospera, a woman played by Helen Mirren. There's an interesting jolt in that gender transition, and again, there's inherent pleasure in hearing such a good actor recite immortal poetry. But the overall impression of this film was stagey and static. Exhaustingly busy camera movement couldn't disguise the lack of movement in the setting or that this was a series of essentially still conversations. It felt like a play, in short, albeit with more expensive sets and flashes of special effects. Most of those latter felt wasted: they got in the way of imagination rather than enhanced it. I'd take Shakespeare's words over ropey CGI every time. And the truth is probably that most plays just make more sense on a single stage, with the actors and audience aware of each other's physical presence.

But that doesn't mean that it's impossible to adapt The Tempest on the screen. I'd recommend the third version of the play I recently watched to anyone. Not coincidentally, this most successful version, Forbidden Planet from 1956, is also the loosest. As the title suggests, instead of an island, the action takes place on a distant planet: Altair IV. Here, the goatee-bearded Prospero stand-in Professor Morbius has been living in near-isolation with his daughter Alataira (Ann Francis) and Robby the Robot, a creature of Morbius's own making, able to synthesise any food from his charmingly round belly ("a housewife's dream", we are told), carry tonne weights and, best of all, manufacture booze and so provide the film with a few welcome moments of comic relief. Morbius also has a very nifty "household disintegrator" beam for destroying his rubbish, a beautifully chic 1950s space house and a fine extra-terrestrial garden complete with deep blue swimming pool. When he is visited by Captain John J Adams (Leslie Nielsen) and his crew, it seems that he's living in a kind of paradise, but for a few dire warnings about the fate of the other people that first arrived on Alatiar IV with Morbius – and the fact that one of Adams's crew members is soon splattered all over the engine room of the flying saucer he flew in on …

Not a word of Shakespeare remains. Naturally, the replacement dialogue doesn't quite measure up to the bard. It's doubtful that anyone will be studying exchanges like the following in 450-years:

"We're down to .386 of lightspeed."
"It's warm in here skipper."
"Yeah."

Even so, the film remains fascinating and entertaining almost 60 years after its production. Some of the entertainment comes from marvelling at Leslie Nielsen's bizarrely emotionless acting style (which he would eventually harness to more deliberately comical effect in Naked Gun). But there's more to it. There's a fine evocation of the mystery and haunting power of the lost civilisation of the planet's previous inhabitants. This is also an intelligent and provocative interpretation of Shakespeare. Mobius's subconscious darkness, his desire to control his daughter, his inability to understand the problems his powers might have caused and the motivation for his final sacrifice all reflect back on the original Prospero in intriguing ways. (Plenty of critics thank the film for introducing the idea that Prospero is battling with his id, as much as anything else.)

It's also a great bit of world building, full of the joy of well-done cinematic special effects and the wonder of science fiction. Indeed, it was the first big-budget science fiction film after the war and we're still reaping the benefits of its commercial and critical success. It was famously a direct influence on Gene Rodenberry and Star Trek, but it could also easily be argued to lead to Star Wars, Blade Runner and countless other films. Films that might not have been made if it weren't for the inspiration of Forbidden Planet – and, in turn, the inspiration of Shakespeare. Making that another thing for which we have to thank the man from Stratford upon Avon.

 

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