Ariel

Miranda, daughter to Prospero, read by Sonia.

Ariel, an airy spirit, read by Sonia.

Iris, a spirit, read by Craig Franklin.

Ceres, a spirit, read by Thomas Peter.

There's other business for thee.

Come, thou tortoise, when?

Re-enter Ariel like a water nymph.

Fine apparition, my quaint Ariel, hark in thine ear.

Act one, scene two.

There, speaking to Ariel, Prospero says, "Hast thou forgot the foul witch Sycorax, who with age and envy was grown into a hoop? This damned witch Sycorax, for mischiefs manifold and sorceries terrible to enter human hearing, was hither brought with child, and there was left by the sailors.

Thou wast then her servant, and for thou wast a spirit too delicate to act her earthly and abhorred commands, refusing her grand hests, she did confine thee, by help of her most potent ministers, and in her most unmitigable rage, into a cloven pine, within which rift imprisoned thou didst painfully remain.

Then was this island, save for the son that she did litter here, a freckled whelp hag born, not honored with a human shape.

That many-visioned art of the theater which age after age has come to liberate the imprisoned imagination of mankind from the fetters of brute force and ignorance.

That same art, which being usurped or stifled by groping part knowledge, prudery, or lust, has been botched in its ideal aims, and like fire ill handled or ill hidden by a passionate child, has wrought havoc, hypocrisy, and decadence.

Caliban, then, in this mask, is that passionate child-curious part of us all, whether as individuals or as races, groveling close to his aboriginal origins, yet groping up and staggering, with almost rhythmic falls and backslidings, toward that serener plane of pity and love, reason and disciplined will, where Miranda and Prospero commune with Ariel and his spirits.

In deference to the master originator of these characters and their names, it is, I think, incumbent on me to point out that these four characters, derived but reimagined from Shakespeare's The Tempest, become, for the purposes of my mask, the presiding symbolic dramatis personae of a plot and conflict which are my own conception.

He's clearly playing it as a slave railing against his bonds.

There's a fire to him, and the way Ben Whishaw, who you may know from James Bond and Paddington, plays Ariel, an air spirit, also indentured to Prospera.

Both of them are in torment, and that is conveyed by the proceedings.

And Tamor does crazy things with music and editing that sometimes feel really off-base and inappropriate in terms of, like, why did it suddenly become thrash metal music? and it's starting to look like an Enya music video, and then it starts to look like a Cradle of Filth music video.

Which is my fault, I'll take credit for that.

But I really loved the nightmarish aspects and the magic.

The air spirit, Ariel.

He's my absolute favourite.