Prospero’s ‘True Preservers’: Oeter Brook, Yukio Ninagawa, and Girogio Strehler– Twentieth-Century Directors Approach Shakespeare’s The Tempest

This work explores how three great modern, international directors have adapted and applied African story-telling techniques, textual deconstruction, traditional Japanese art and theatrical forms, and Italian stage tradition to their productions of William Shakespeare’s great play, ,I>The Tempest. It is an analysis of how these directors’ approaches to this same canonical work have contributed to the development of the modern stage director and how the application of classical forms like commedia dell’ arte and No theater has informed the creation of a new performance vocabulary. At the same time, Prospero’s ‘True Preservers’ investigates the issue of post-colonial changes in the dynamics of the Prospero-Caliban relationship and how these three directors’ disparate interpretations of the incendiary confederacy has impacted upon the play’s contemporary performance history.