2017
The Last Tempest
Post-dramatic adaptation of Shakespeare’s The Tempest.
00 / Summary
The Last Tempest was a five-act post-dramatic adaptation of Shakespeare’s The Tempest, devised and performed at Aalborg Theatre on their black box stage.
My primary responsibilities were co-writing and directing Act II, and projection design across the production.
01 / Adaptation
Rewriting the island
The Tempest has repeatedly been remade around the concerns of its present. Our question was therefore less how do we modernise Shakespeare? than:
What would the original relationships of power, servitude and rebellion look like in a contemporary or near-future setting?
Our answer was a corporate-technological dystopia.
Magic became technological control. Prospero became a disgraced executive; Ariel, an artificial intelligence bound to his service; Caliban, a worker held through debt. The island became a system of corporations, surveillance, pharmaceuticals and mediated power.
The point was not to preserve Shakespeare's objects, but the relationships underneath them.
02 / Dramaturgy
Adaptation means alteration
My group had responsibility for act II; Caliban's act. He changed a lot in our hands.
Shakespeare's enslaved islander became an indebted worker: still subordinate to Prospero, but now trapped by a system that could survive its master. We also pulled him away from the broad comedy of the original act and toward exhaustion, anger and moral uncertainty.
Stephano and Trinculo too underwent a strange translation. They became Stephanol and Trinculol — performance-enhancing pharmaceuticals Caliban depends upon when his body can no longer satisfy Prospero's demands. Their comic intoxication survives, but as something harsher: chemical productivity, hallucination and a voice urging him beyond obedience.
In Shakespeare, the trio's drinking session destabilizes Caliban's existing relationship with Prospero and helps produce his fantasy of revolt. Our adaptation preserves that dramatic function while changing its form: alcohol and drinking companions → productivity drugs and disembodied voices.
So we didn't rename two characters with a pharmaceutical joke. We translated their dramaturgical function into the new world of the adaptation.
03 / Direction
A sensory score
Before rehearsals I made what I called a linear moodboard: Act II stretched across time through colour, sound, imagery, atmosphere and emotion - essentially a simple director's vision.
After the production I created a second version, documenting what the sequence had become through writing, rehearsal and collaboration.
Together, the two diagrams show the movement from an imagined sensory dramaturgy to the performed act:
Pre-production "moodboard"
Post-production "moodboard"
04 / Intermediality
Media as performer
The stage itself remained comparatively simple. Few props. Simple costumes. Much of its transformation happened through media design.
Projection, lighting and sound established changing environments around Caliban: controlled corporate light during work, Ariel’s mediated interventions, and increasingly unstable colour, pattern and sound during the hallucination.
Ariel also changed form in our adaptation, as they had no conventional physical body throughout most of the play; layered voices and projection were Ariel’s presence on stage. Responsive graphics reacting with sound from the stage gave the disembodied character life. Other acts used electronic props as pseudo-instruments to generate audio based on performers' movements. We also explored projection as a transformed reflection of Caliban himself, using live camera input and VVVV to turn the performer’s movements into an abstract mediated double.
Through rehearsals, the performers learned to respond to that mediated presence as if another actor rather than merely as a technical cue.
The media did more than provide scenery behind the performers; they shared the stage.
05 / Collaboration
Devising, deliberating
While each semester group carried responsibility for one act, The Last Tempest was very much developed in unison. We devised it together on the stage at Aalborg Theatre — writing, rehearsing, testing, changing and negotiating a shared performance.
Shakespeare provided the starting text, our shared stimulus, whose characters and scenes were pulled apart and reconstructed. Our different ideas and direction for the original story emerged, and through ensemble and shared experimentation, they converged on stage, the final form more or less cohesive.
That process extended beyond the five act groups. Sound, lighting and projection were developed alongside performance, while Aalborg Theatre supplied the stage and the practical reality in which all those ideas eventually had to coexist.
The manuscript became one trace of that process rather than its sole origin: dialogue sits among movements, sound, lighting and projection cues, each dependent upon the others.
XX / Additional media
Gallery
