The Tempest

Reviewed by Paul Birchall
Theatre Unlimited at T.U. Studios
Through August 24

Photo by Matthew Caine Studio

The first thing one notices about director Gloria Gifford’s production of Shakespeare’s comedy of magic, maturity, and redemption is that the show credits a translator, John Crowther, who appears to be listed for his work in translating the play . . . well, from English, I suppose.

Gifford explains, in her preshow announcement, that her production is a work of No Fear Shakespeare.  Now, what this means will probably be familiar to school kids, if not jaded theater-goers such as myself:  There’s a series of Shakespeare paperback texts, so cunningly designed that the left page of the book, when laid flat, contains Shakespeare’s dialogue, while the right side boasts a colloquial translation that assists with understanding the concepts and themes that are sometimes difficult to parse in the original iambic pentameter.

It is certainly an intriguing idea to perform, not Shakespeare, but the No Fear edition of the work.  The results, however, are ultimately horrifying, somewhat akin to watching a sort of crazy other-worldly version of The Tempest that’s been translated by Google into Urdu and then back again into English. It’s just linguistically maladroit, with clunky, awkward dialogue and flatfooted turns-of-phrase substituting for the beauty of Shakespeare’s poetry.  Lovely lines like “Of my instruction hast thou nothing bated in what thou hadst to say – So with good life and observation strange, my meaner ministers their several kinds have done” becomes “You said everything I told you to say.  In the same lifelike way, and with the same attention to detail, my lower ranking servants have done what they were supposed to do.”  Clunk.  Clunk.  Clunk.

The plot is the same as the original, with the great wizard Prospero (Robert May) and his daughter Miranda (Kasia Pilewicz) and their servants Ariel (Lucy Walsh) and Caliban (Francis Lansang) on their magical isle, causing mischief and trouble for the shipwrecked Antonio (Glenn Fancher), his son Ferdinand (Chad Doreck), and other sailors.  And, yet, the No Fear dialogue leeches the work of its music and magic, and the piece instead becomes a trudge of banal writing, rendered almost comically with the arm-waving affection that actors usually have for Shakespeare.  It’s hard to be overly sympathetic to the production’s goals when we can’t see beyond the notion that No Fear is meant to be a tool to understanding the real play, not the play itself.

Gifford’s staging is straightforward and steadfastly superficial. The adapted lines are delivered and that’s it – no nuance, no emotional subtext, no ambiguity.  In Gifford’s awkwardly rudimentary blocking, some of the performers seem a little too inexperienced — even with this watered-down material.

That said, May’s flinty and gruff Prospero is interestingly inscrutable, while Walsh’s high-spirited Ariel offers perhaps one of the play’s most genuinely moving moments: kissing Prospero’s hand when he frees her.  Lansang imbues his Caliban with an engagingly ferocious anger that approaches insanity.  But the adaptation is less of a case of No Fear than it is No Faith in the Original Play.

Theatre Unlimited at T.U. Studios, 10943 Camarillo Blvd, N. Hlwyd.; Sat., 8 p.m.; Sun., 7:30 p.m.; through August 24.  (310) 366-5505.