Directing the Romances

Summary

Productions of Shakespeare’s plays at universities occupy a stretch of theatrical territory which might baffle the most skilled of surveyors. Longer, at least in theory, in ideas and understanding of the text than most professional productions, they are at the same time even shorter in terms of resources than the average amateur company. For all this, it is hard to resist the feeling that struggling with the play in production, even in these circumstances, is a critical exercise more illuminating than almost any other. Formal problems, the problems of staging, do not necessarily obscure the problems of theme or interpretation. An active sense of the relationship between the two indeed can be immensely suggestive. In the case of The Tempest, which I had the somewhat strenuous pleasure of directing for the English Department of the University of Liverpool in the Spring of 1974, there seem to me to be two major problems of dramatic form which are of the most immediate relevance to our sense of the play’s meaning.