Tara Arts’ Tempest
from issue Number 1, Summer 2009
by Katherine A. Evans

On 9th January 2008, amidst ongoing debates between Islamic and Christian religious leaders regarding religious and ethnic tolerance in Britain,[1] the Asian-British theater company Tara Arts opened its production of William Shakespeare's The Tempest in London's Arts Theatre. The performance was greatly pared down to feature six multi-racial actors dressed in simple Moorish-inspired costume on an almost bare stage (though admittedly, this version is less sparse than Mark Rylance's flawed 2005 Globe rendition featuring three men and a rope). In Tara's production, Prospero's musings on revenge, power and absolution become those of a Middle-Eastern tyrant; the blossoming romance between Miranda and Ferdinand take place across the Muslim veil; and character roles are paired to match the oppressor with the oppressed. Perhaps most notable about the production, though, are not its purely Islamic influences, but their context in the hyphenated identity of a British-Asian production. The emphasis on the ethnic and cultural identities of the cast members and the insistence upon a minimalist performance makes this production as much about the nature of Englishness as about racial and religious diversity. Tara's Tempest enters stormily into the debate on globalization and English national identity, speaking to contemporary anxieties about race and ethnicity.

In his notes to The Tempest, Tara's founder and director Jatinder Verma—who emigrated from Kenya to Britain as a teenager—explains that the play is, in large part, about confinement. Prospero has enslaved Caliban and Ariel, just as, more metaphorically, he captures and controls the shipwrecked King of Naples and his crew; but even Prospero, who in this production is perhaps most notable for his omniscient power, is an exile, trapped on this deserted island. The actors play upon a desolate wooden stage, completely bare except for six ropes that hang from the ceiling. The ropes, as the primary set pieces, serve a variety of purposes: they are the raging Tempest as the play opens and the treacherous swords wielded by Antonio and Sebastian. Most significantly, however, they are the source of Prospero's magic—the means by which he enslaves and controls the other players, and, ironically, also the representation of his entrapment in his own web of vengeance and terror.

Like the ropes, the characters themselves are versatile and ever-changing. The doubling of parts—Ferdinand and Sebastian, Miranda and Alonso, Caliban and Gonzalo—not only fits with the production's minimalist aesthetic, but also explicitly drives home questions of identity. A simple switch of costume visually indicates most role-changes, but they are made most real for the audience through an alteration in dialect or accent—indicating class, region, or race differences. All of the players upon this Shakespearean stage, despite the varying colors of their skin, are decidedly English, representing a range of speech patterns from across the country, including British West-Indian and African accents. In a play about political power and severed family ties, the doubling of characters emphasizes the diversity of identities as well as the interstitial spaces that are often unnoticed in Shakespeare's text. Coupled with the ethnic overtones of the production, the character doubling forces us to question the black-and-white divisions between characters and their roles in the play. The very fact that the audience so clearly follows minor shifts from character to character is in itself evidence of the mutability of identity and the overlaps between people and allegiances that seem so diametrically opposed.

While some critics of Tara's Tempest, most notably Howard Loxton,[2] have disregarded this production's specifically Asian-British approach to Shakespeare's play, there can be no doubt that the decision to cast Prospero as an exiled Orthodox Muslim, who veils his daughter and seeks revenge on those who ousted him from his homeland, has extraordinary resonances in the context of contemporary Britain. As Dominic Cavendish writes in his review for The Telegraph, there is "nothing glib about this approach."[3] This social relevance has been precisely Tara's aim since its beginnings as a student project founded in the aftermath of the 1979 racially-provoked murder of Gurdip Singh Chaggar, an Asian-British teenager. Jatinder Verma recalls that this incident "was to prove the peak of the monsterisation of Asians—the era of ‘Paki-bashing'—and was the catalyst that led us to launch Tara."

Indeed, Verma's artistic and social vision directs and shapes all of Tara's work, and the company has become known for its inter-racial re-workings of classic "fables" of East and West—from Rabindranath Tagore's play Sacrifice to Shakespeare and Sophocles—in order to give new meanings not only to traditionally "ethnic" theatre but also to definitions of what it does (and can) mean to be British. In a cultural context in which Shakespeare has come to stand for ‘traditional'—read: white—British culture, Verma's vision for this new production of The Tempest is de-familiarizing and provocative.

Verma has written that The Tempest "needs no added interpretation to come close to the heart of what Tara's theatre is about,"[4] —the play is, as he puts it, "a classic story of Them and Us"—but it is more than the story of Prospero and Caliban, separatism and empathy, that makes the play an appropriate choice. Shakespeare carries enormous cultural capital across the world, but nowhere more so than in England—the land of the pure, unadulterated and iconic Bard. In London, a city where Shakespeare's face adorns everything from Starbucks mugs to the walls of Charing Cross tube station, Shakespeare acts as "a successful logo or brand name,"[5] as the scholar Sonia Massia puts it. Ironically, though, this commercial Shakespeare is a bogus symbol of purity and authenticity. In London, and in England generally, Shakespeare is still largely regarded as inviolate. Despite the wealth of available texts, it is not particularly surprising for a critic to open his review with the proud declaration that "Shakespeare is back with a vengeance… Long may it continue!"[6] (When Shakespeare had ever disappeared is, presumably, another question). With such great stock placed on the reputation of England's national poet, the "most English of men,"[7] Verma's vision of The Tempest, is fundamentally "foreign". In fact, the racial otherness of Verma's play led almost every major critic who reviewed the production to comment upon how well the multi-racial cast managed to articulate the Shakespearean verse![8] Why, one must ask, should this fact be surprising? Shakespeare, it seems, is still regarded as the domain of the white Englishman: merely an idea of what England was or should be.

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