The Tempest: Declan Donnellan and Oskaras Korsunovas Look Backwards into the Abyss of Time
The Tempest: Declan Donnellan and Oskaras Korsunovas Look Backwards into the Abyss of Time

Author(s): Maria Shevtsova
Subject(s): Theatre, Dance, Performing Arts, Cultural history, Theoretical Linguistics, Studies of Literature, Philology, Theory of Literature, British Literature
Published by: Wydawnictwa Uniwersytetu Warszawskiego
Keywords: The Tempest; Declan Donnellan; Cheek by Jowl; Oskaras Korsunovas; OKT/Vilnius City Theatre; Shakespeare
Summary/Abstract: A reinvigorated interest in The Tempest by world-famous directors has surfaced in the past few years to give Shakespeare’s play some rather unexpected twists and turns. The most notable among recent productions has been the work of Declan Donnellan (2010) with the Russian sister company of Cheek by Jowl, which he founded in Britain in 1981, and the concise, fist-in-the-gut appropriation Miranda, After Shakespeare’s ‘The Tempest’ (2011) directed by Oskaras Korsunovas with the OKT/Vilnius City Theatre, founded in 1998. The striking link between these two productions is the way they cast their gaze into the Soviet past, each director having a different relationship with it. Donnellan essentially achieves it through his Russian ensemble where, as noted in this article, he was helped by actors fully experienced in devising the performance material through the étude method characteristic of the Russian school of acting. Korsunovas’s is a direct, visceral relationship, which is expressed in the corrosive surrealism of his perspective. The latter is in some ways close in spirit to the satirical humour of Donnellan’s production, but the interest of putting these two productions side by side is to highlight the singularity of each, and to show how each operates within the framework developed for it.

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