Directing Tempest Masque: orchestrating the puzzle of ‘the rabble’ in Shakespeare’s The Tempest

My practice-as-research inquiry explores how approaching William Shakespeare’s The Tempest through a lens of the Renaissance masque genre offers transferrable dramaturgy to the contemporary theatre director and ensemble. Through historical research and practical experimentation, I explore the masque prototype towards establishing a dynamic ‘conversation’ between Jacobean and contemporary performance creation. My project is informed by the only documented early 17th century performances of The Tempest (1611/1613) at Banqueting House-Whitehall Palace, London. My historical research focuses on the King’s Men’s adaptive productions as potentially akin to the masques of Ben Jonson and other masquewrights, deploying purpose-built, multi-media stagecraft, and classical theatre configurations combined with carnivalesque and ritualesque traditions. My inquiry explores how working with some of the formulated parameters of the Jacobean masque in a contemporary setting can grant a diversity of content and style. I relate the content, purpose and form of the Jacobean masque to modern and contemporary productions. My PaR project is named Tempest Masque as it aims to emphasise the masque episodes in The Tempest that are visual, choric, and visceral, incorporating various sources of text, music, and dance. My PaR draws on traditional masque practices towards unifying non-text-based elements of The Tempest for a contemporary audience in a way that recreates the ‘festival’ atmosphere of the original masque context. My research showcases those elements of Shakespeare’s invention less familiar within a contemporary context, such as the element of the chorus, named by Prospero as ‘the rabble’. I conduct a series of workshops with actors to explore strategies for performing The Tempest chorus, leading to productions of Tempest Masque, drawing on experimentation in the ‘labs’. My practice builds an array of tools through which to orchestrate an alternative treatment of the text, incorporating live music, embodied scenography, mask forms, physical and poetic challenges, structured improvisation, and audience participation.