Prospero's Books

Shakespeare's The Tempest tells of Prospero, exiled on an island, and the enemies wrecked onto its shore. In this adaptation every word of the play comes from one mouth: Prospero speaks, and speaks the other characters' lines as well. Only towards the end do others begin to speak in their own voices. The subject is not the plot but the act of writing. Prospero is writing the play and what we see is the inside of his head; everything on the island comes out of his books. The form is extremely dense: several layers of image occupy the screen at once, frames open at the edges, text and picture overlap. Peter Greenaway used a high-resolution video editing system that was new at the time, and it is regarded as an early instance of digital layering in cinema. Michael Nyman's score runs unbroken. John Gielgud plays Prospero. He had wanted to play the part on screen for years and had taken it to other directors before; he finally did it in his eighties, with Greenaway. Who it is for: viewers who like formal experiment and Greenaway's visual density. Who it is not for: anyone wanting to follow the text; with the voice gathered into one mouth, the play itself stays in the background.