Ariel and I: One and the Same?

The beauty of Ariel from Shakespeare’s The Tempest is one that is explored through many mediums, one of which is stage. The stage aspect of it personifies this spirit like character through costume, makeup, characterization, and physicality. One such unique adaptation that I might be focusing on in my essay is that of Ariel’s physicality, intention, objectives, and action tactics in the Royal Shakespeare Company’s production of The Tempest.

An actor’s first job when assigned a role is to define their objectives, superobjective, and figure out their action tactics, which are the ways that you achieve your objectives. When reading Ariel’s lines in the play and then comparing and contrasting that to how I pictured Ariel, their are key differences that I find intriguing. One starking difference is in the physicality. I mostly pictured Ariel as a flying creature, similar to Puck in a Midsummer Night’s Dream. In Shakespeare’s plays, fairy’s tend to have magical powers and report to someone in a higher position of power, therefore I imagined Ariel looking like Puck, and serving a similar role to Prospero that Puck does to Oberon. The way he was portrayed however, was someone who was one with the earth. They wore colors of blue, green, had scales, and blended in with the ground. These colors almost portray him as converting between different elements in the earth, almost like “a shape-shifting digital sprite”.Whereas in the reading, it came of like he was more with the sky. Furthermore, their mode of movement and position on stage was different than what my interpretation was in the movie. Ariel’s movement were light, flexible, and fluid. He walks on his toes, and often sinks to the ground gracefully before rising with his own body movements. This mode of movement is similar in some ways and different to what I pictured. Ariel in the stage adaptation walks around on his toes and uses the lower half of his body often, while maintaining a calm stillness in his upper body. In the play I pictured his energy mostly coming from his upper body.

While I positioned Ariel as above the characters in height, hiding in trees and casting spells from the sky, the director positioned Ariel in the middle of the chaos, walking around and controlling the characters right next to them. While in the reading Ariel felt distant from the scene even though he was physically present, this stage adaptation put Ariel as a keen observer, taking the scene in much like the way the viewer is. This almost makes us relate to him, as he is understanding these new characters and his surroundings as the viewer is as well. In contrast, the reading makes our connecting to Ariel slightly more complicated, as his omnipresence in the scenes feel foreign to the reader.

The objectives of Ariel in the play and in the adaptation were more or less the same: to earn his freedom. The action tactics that Ariel uses in both the play and the stage are very similar. They continue to be bound by their servitude with the hope that their freedom will come soon. However, the energy between Ariel and Prospero are different than how I had imagined. In the play, Ariel seems to “lack much human emotion”. However, in the stage adaptation I found there to be a starking difference. There was a rather beautiful and peaceful moment between Ariel and Prospero at the end where the two of them gaze at each other as their final goodbye. In this final moment, a bounty of unspoken emotions flow between the two of them: sorrow, abandonment, gratitude, and love. I felt that Prospero was more of a father figure to Ariel in the stage adaptation than in the play, as he held these same emotions in his eyes. It made their parting bittersweet, as Ariel grapples with the idea that he finally earned his freedom, but he is leaving his caretaker. It makes the reader wonder if Ariel will be more joyful in his new life. My take on it is that it will be somewhere in between; Ariel will learn to become his own person, which will empower him, but he will grapple with feelings of abandonment and loss. He has become adapted to a life with Prospero, now he will have to learn to let go.

To continue, Ariel possesses many qualities that I can relate to in my life. His keen skill of observation, determination to complete his tasks to the best of his ability, and the need for independence. He deals with the complexities of the emotion he feels in his servitude by ignoring it. Instead, he replaces it with thoughts of the future, and the hope that eventually he will find his way out. I think many of us in society tend to try to push positive thoughts in place of our pain, because society tells us that happy people “keep their minds on what they want”. But in reality, it isn’t exactly that easy. How can we deal with our inner pain by thinking about what we want? Learning to accept pain is much more powerful than pretending like it isn’t there. Ariel has a lot of imprisonment and trauma to deal with, yet he mostly pushes it off, much like most human beings in society. In this way Ariel is a direct metaphor to many of us in society, his relationship with others is difficult, but his relationship with himself is much more complicated.