- Subtitled in English
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The almost uninhabited island of Shakespeare’s The Tempest, as a kind of terra nullius, is a place of endless possibilities for those who agree to inhabit it. In this no man’s land, subject to its own laws and the laws of artistic illusion, Shakespeare, in what is considered to be his last play, puts each character through extreme and laboratory-refined situations, leaving them to face their essential nature, thereby examining the capacities of human nature and the nature of its civilisational knowledge.
Prospero's island can be considered a model of human society, a microcosm of all fundamental social relations. Stripped and stripping, it is revealed as one great food chain of Power. It is clear in this context that there is no difference between a good king and a tyrant. And that history, ever since that moment when it became exclusively human, is always the same, eternal struggle, with the power of the human mind writing the same, mostly cruel history over and over again. It is also clear that human thought is aimed at conquering, and that colonisation with knowledge is built into education. That violence is global, and education for violence is the only way to ensure existence. Everything that Homo sapiens achieved, he used as leverage against life and nature, creating conflict. Our cultural memory has moved on long ago from the enthusiasm for the idea of conquering from the age of Prospero's books for Renaissance magi and his scientific knowledge of appropriating the forces of nature. From the age when human thought was lagging far behind the available means of realization, all the way to technological achievements and apocalyptic visions of the enormous potential for destruction, when we feel the tension rising in our ‘civilised’ reality. And the question of what this reality unfolding before us is, with the universal applicability of science and omnipresence of scientific rationality. When the fact that science is dominated by force and profit, by the principle of appropriation as its cornerstone, becomes another moral problem of civilisation. When magic is reinterpreted by the magic of branding, while we are enchanted by models of economic efficiency and dedicated to cracking the human code. When at the same time this age can interpret a two-thousand-year-old ethical model as a consumer model based on the consumption of ethics, and its corresponding narrative of forgiveness as an idea that, with a well-thought-out strategy, successfully uses its consumer potential.
Our receptive and media-oriented age can imagine renouncing books of magic in order to return to secular books, and Prospero’s mental and spiritual process as the realization that he cannot change anything. His magic wand has not changed a thing, the world is violence and struggle for power, as it always was. The food chain of Power is unbreakable, it is a constant of the human race in every society, while ‘We are such stuff as dreams are made on, and our little life is rounded with a sleep.’ The mechanism of history is unchanging, it always returns to the same point. This is where we are, from Shakespeare to this day.
Realising this, Prospero, once exiled, simply decided to reintegrate and rule. And he wants to be considered a ruler. This Prospero will therefore not lead, nor take anyone, except for two young people who are amazed by this world, the ‘brave new world’ which for them is not yet painted in Huxley's colours. He can neither be the director of morality, nor is his island Utopia. Catharsis is not possible here. Being aware of this, he knows he needs to start all over again.
The Tempest is open to many interpretations. Shakespeare's play was initially performed as part of the court festivities, while Dryden's version dominated the performance history later on. Our adaptation, in line with the principles of Shakespearean theatre, is primarily focused on the relationship with the contemporary, real and living world, which today throws at us the burning question of how we understood the conditions of our survival. We were also interested in the context of the original performance, as part of the festivities surrounding the wedding of Princess Elisabeth, daughter of James I; the form of commedia dell'arte whose strong influence is present in the entire structure of The Tempest, as well as in the Shakespearean palette of characters; an inseparable mixture of the poetic, cruel and grotesque, because beauty and ugliness in Shakespeare's and our own reality are only a matter of point of view.
Vesna Đikanović
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