About

"Film is the wedding of light and matter — an alchemical conjunction. My readings in the Renaissance magi — Dee, Bruno, Paracelsus, Fludd and Cornelius Agrippa — helped to conjure the film of The Tempest."
Derek Jarman, Dancing Ledge (1984)

Shakespeare's finale play about revenge and redemption tells the story of ageing magician Prospero who is exiled to an island and imprisoned with his daughter Miranda and the beastly slave Caliban. Prospero seeks revenge on his brother Antonio who has conspired against him and with the assistance of the commanding spirit Ariel raises a storm to shipwreck Antonio and his accomplices. In Derek Jarman's reimagining, the events of Shakespeare's story take place inside a burnt and decaying country estate which the protagonists never leave (the 500-year-old Stoneleigh Abbey and Bamburgh). Producer Colin MacCabe described it as "a ruined aristocratic house, an imperial monument."

Hermetically sealed from the outside world and lit by candlelight, Jarman gives Shakespeare's mystical ode a psychological inflection, wherein nostalgia itself is seen to be literally rotting. Jarman's choice of location reflected and problematised the English heritage film genre that enjoyed popularity at the time, and by extension, the desire to invest in nationalist reveries of the colonial Empire. The Tempest is also Jarman's 'punk' imagining of Shakespeare, with cast members drawn from the world of punk and the costuming and production design reflecting punk's rebellious 'cut-up' aesthetic. It is a strategy enabling Jarman to crisscross history and time so that the film feels neither Elizabethan nor contemporary. As Jarman described, it remains "indistinct past, a conglomerate of many styles, emphasising the timelessness of the play." Not without its light-hearted flourishes, Jarman changes Shakespeare's ending and allows Prospero to retain his magic, and ends the film with a camp-punk spectacle that features blues singer Elisabeth Welch performing 'Stormy Weather' surrounded by gay sailors.

Jarman dedicated The Tempest to the memory of his mother Elizabeth Evelyn Jarman. In an early draft of the script, the film ended with the voiceover: "I'm so sorry it had to be like this – I would have liked the dance to go on for ever.