I am writing music for Shakespeare’s The Tempest, and I’m setting the Ariel songs, yellow sands full fathom five where the bee sucks, and I’m thinking; I’m not the first person to be doing this. The play has existed for more than 400 years. Supposing there are 500 productions a year, hang on, that can’t always have been so, for years there must only a few, sometimes none, can we say overall an average of 250 productions a year, and most of them have original music (do they?), let’s say 200 productions a year have original music, that’s 80000 settings of these songs, oh that’s a lot of full fathom fives.

*

This is a strange illuminating fascinating Tempest, directed by Tim Crouch at the tiny (indoor) Sam Wanamaker Theatre at the Globe. Tim has form making experimental theatre which challenges the normal relationship between performers and audience. His take on The Tempest: Prospero and Miranda, Caliban and Ariel are on the island (the stage), have been on the island for many years, and will be on the island as long as they live. There is no escape. In order to make their life bearable, they tell themselves a story, a story of redemption and escape. But at the end of the play here they are on the island still, preparing to tell the story again. The other characters – Ferdinand, Alonso, Sebastian, Antonio (here Antonia), Gonzalo, Stephano, Trinculo – are conjured from the audience, and end up back in the audience. There is a heart-breaking moment when Miranda climbs off the stage, finds herself in the audience, and is overwhelmed by the presence of these unfamiliar people, these beautiful people – ‘O brave new world, that has such creatures in it’ – before Prospero brutally calls her back on stage.

And another radical interpretation – as Tim prepares to cast the play, I say to him: please alert me when you’re auditioning possible Ariels, as it’s obviously essential that Ariel is a good singer. Not necessary, he says. I’ve cast Ariel (the wonderful Naomi Wirthner) and she’s not going to sing. Actors singing, he says, it’s a pain in the neck. You spend so much time working on the singing, you run out of time to work on the text. To me this is alien territory. I’ve spent most of my life asking singers to act, and enjoying the result, the shimmying between speech and singing. And I’ve always been interested by the fact that Ariel is almost unique in Shakespeare: a main character who sings, who sings songs that affect the narrative, for example ‘While you here do sleeping lie’ which wakes up Alonso and Gonzalo, saving them from being murdered by Antonio and Sebastian.

And will Ariel carry out Prospero’s magic, as she does in the original play? No, there will be no magic inside the story, Tim says; the magic will come from the performance. So – an Ariel that doesn’t sing, doesn’t make magic. Naomi struggles with this in rehearsal, but eventually finds a persona: a maternal figure, an irritable peacemaker. She is very definitely human, fiercely human (so her line ‘Were I human’ is very confounding). 

We decide that all the music will be sung, by professional singers (ah, no need for endless workshops and tutorials!) Yes, five, ten, fifteen please, sounds coming disconcertingly from all directions (‘Where should this music be? – i’th’air or th’earth?). But well, no, don’t be ridiculous, budget budget, three maximum, ok let’s work with two, less is more, let’s push the limits of two people singing. And have more rehearsal time! So - Victoria Couper, brilliant singer of early music, and Emma Bonnici, wonderful improviser with a profound sense of theatre – both of them full of curiosity and always ready to experiment.

I decide that the music is the music of the island (‘the isle is full of noises’). Strange off-kilter songs and sounds coming from all over the theatre, many different kinds of extreme stereo, as playful and unpredictable as possible. Music to calm, to confuse, to hypnotise. Call and response, hocketting, birdsong, animal sounds, subterranean sounds, tiny sounds. And some earworm tunes. The play is full of wonderful song lyrics – yellow sands full fathom five where the bee sucks – but the lyric I enjoy most in this version is Stephano and Trinculo’s song, which Ariel brilliantly undermines: ‘Flout ‘em and scout ‘em / Scout ‘em and flout ‘em / Thought is free.’ Tim clearly likes this lyric too, as he uses Thought is free as a strapline for the production.

There’s a curious moment in rehearsals. Patricia and Mercè, playing Stephano and Trinculo, come up with the idea of singing ‘Amigos para siempre’ to each other when they are blissfully reunited after the shipwreck, the signature song of the 1992 Barcelona Olympics, and I think, heck that’s a horrible song, but I obligingly do an arrangement before realising it’s by Andrew Lloyd Webber, my least favourite composer in the world. Good for my soul. And at least two of my friends who come to see the show say oh and I particularly liked that one with the lyrics in Spanish…….

*

A gloriously provocative idea: the masque that Prospero engineers for Miranda and Ferdinand’s marriage goes electric. Four minutes of frisky LED lighting, automated movement and amplified music (with backing vocals, so suddenly there are, apparently, ten singers). The Globe has always eschewed theatre lighting and amplification, preferring to play to the rules of Shakespearian theatre – except for a period when Emma Rice was running the place. She was given the job despite being clear that she preferred the Archers to Shakespeare, and she introduced lighting and loud music. The audiences liked it, but the management didn’t, so she had to go, and the theatre returned to low-tech. But Tim sneaks in a burst of electrification – here is a glimpse of what we can do….