Tabling: The Tempest Act II

Mitchel Kawash, Will McKay, Zoë Goslin and Ariana Karp discuss Act II of The Tempest.

  • Staging must be very, very precise in both of the scenes in this Act
  • The scenes make more sense in the context of staging, meaning derived from the movement
  • Antonio and Sebastian as one focal point and Alonso & Gonzalo as the other focal point
  • Gonzalo’s Utopia speech lifted from Montaigne’s essays
  • “Noble Savage” idea and its undercutting within the act
  • Bringing back the ‘native’ creature from the isle for profit is an idea which occurs to four characters in the play
  • Shakespeare’s prophetic vision of colonizer and colonized 
  • The temptation of Sebastian to ambition and power by the political mastermind that is Antonio
  • Antonio is a “modern” political creation
  • Elasticity of interpreting The Tempest
  • Why does Prospero put all the courtiers asleep and leave Sebastian and Antonio awake? Is it a test of their characters to see if they have changed? 
  • Parallels of Prospero and Sycorax 
Simon Russell Beale as Ariel and Alec McCowen as Prospero in the RSC's 1993 production. 

Simon Russell Beale as Ariel and Alec McCowen as Prospero in the RSC's 1993 production.