A follow-up from last week’s workshop, this time posting a video selection from character interviews with three Calibans. While the dialogue content is possibly useful in offering glosses and tonalities to the Shakespearean text, I find the actors’ physicality extremely evocative: how they think, how they hide, the body and the face the thoughts emerge from. The characters obviously appear very different from one another, but they can also be seen as different aspects of a single character. I could certainly see David’s rage and anguish, Danny’s guarded recessiveness and confusion, and Elizabeth’s flashes of cunning and longing all as aspects of our puppet Caliban.

I was struck by several elements:
* Caliban’s capacity for astonishment, as when in the video David is dumbstruck at the thought of seeing himself objectively. In the play, he parallels Miranda in this respect, discovering a new world and its potentials.
* As with Miranda, memory of the sexual attempt and its ensuing punishment is a deeply unhealed wound, a radical shift in the worlds of both.
* The yearning for freedom pervades the play: Caliban and Ariel from their enslavement, Prospero from his victimhood, Miranda from her isolation and dependency, Ferdinand from his grief, the nobility from their guilt-spurred hunger, the flunkies from their flunkeydom, the living island from its intruders, and everyone from the throes of the Tempest itself.

And this exploration throws me into renewed wrestling with the knottiest issue in The Tempest: how does it end? It’s clear, though bittersweet, for Prospero. it’s clear for Miranda & Ferdinand, and the others more or less fall into place, with Antonio stifled but clearly checkmated. Yet for the most compelling character, Caliban, it all trails off. Prospero’s “This thing of darkness I acknowledge mine” could be glossed as deeply metaphoric or simply as taking responsibility for his own slave’s actions. At the end, Prospero simply orders him to tidy up the study if he hopes for forgiveness, and Caliban vows to “seek for grace.”

Do they all sail off without Caliban, leaving him as the free king of the isle, the spirit-ridden psychotic, or the lonely exile? Does Prospero take him back to Milan, as bastard son, court fool, or some retarded foster child to be kept back in the servants’ quarters of the palazzo? Shakespeare sweeps him under the rug and gets on to the end, but I don’t think the audience is satisfied with such a low-key non-conclusion. We needn’t know what happens outside the play: Malvolio’s future career isn’t spelled out, but his final “I’ll be reveng’d on you all!” makes a resounding final chord to his role. Somehow the role of Caliban must find its final note, and that note must crystallize its essence.

Thoughts, anyone?
–Conrad