Until October 13, director Omar Porras is creating “The Tempest” after William Shakespeare at the Théâtre Kléber-Méleau in Renens (VD), a play full of magical realism. Masks, puppets, costumes and spectacular sets are at the service of this total spectacle filled with madness and audacity.
Written around 1610 by William Shakespeare, “The Tempest” is among the last plays composed by the English playwright. Like “A Midsummer Night’s Dream” (1594), it belongs to his comedy repertoire and contains a strong element of magic.
The director Omar Porras, conductor of the Kléber-Méleau theater (TKM) in Renens, takes this milestone of the classical repertoire to reinvent it in Teatro Malandro style, with strong special effects, masks, shimmering costumes, spectacular sets and puppets by Carole Allemand, a master of the genre.
It is the magical realism that infuses the play that attracted the director of Colombian origin. “’The Tempest’ is one of the rare plays by Shakespeare where there are so many relationships with the mysterious, dreams, illusion, magic, the afterlife and the occult sciences,” recalls -he in the Vertigo show on September 26. “It is also a piece which raises a historical question, a little over a century after the meeting between America and Europe. Religion, science, philosophy, everything is questioned.”
The earth and the spirits
The play tells the story of the Duke of Milan, Prospero, deposed and forced into exile by his own brother, Antonio. With his daughter Miranda, Prospero finds himself on a not entirely deserted island. The magic conferred by his books allows him to tame natural elements and spirits, including those of Ariel, the positive spirit of the air, and Caliban, a being described as “wild”. One day a ship ran aground on the island carrying Antonio, the usurper brother, the King of Naples Alonso and his son Ferdinand. Thanks to his gift for magic, Prospero imposes different tests on these three characters.
And everything ends well: Prospero makes peace with his brother and Alonso, marries Miranda to Ferdinand, frees the spirits Ariel and Caliban and renounces magic to regain his duchy. “He questions himself and that’s what’s beautiful about the play: he gives back the knowledge to those who had it and who know how to use it and he decides to leave with a great benefit. It’s not not gold or matter, it is the benefit brought by forgiveness, reconciliation, the notion of freedom and peace”, indicates Omar Porras.
The influence of Peter Brook
In 1990, Omar Porras attended a performance of “The Tempest” directed by the Franco-British Peter Brook in Zurich. He emerges marked by “the simplicity” of this theater. Driven by the same intentions for his own production at TKM in 2024, he ultimately had to give it up. With the team of actors, he is unable to work in this “purification”, he reports. Then masks and puppets appear in the creative process and the work continues in the form of a research laboratory, improvising.
In the end, “The Storm” Malandro version constantly oscillates between a theater for adults and a theater for children with just enough magic and realism to speak to everyone. “Theatre is made for everyone. Shakespeare wrote for the people and all categories of the population were present in the galleries of the Globe theater. (…) I think we have lost that, we have become quite arrogant and pretentious. We have cleaned the theater too much of this flavor, of this smell”, concludes the one who has put audacity at the center of his practice.
Comments collected by Pierre Philippe Cadert
Adaptation web: Melissa Härtel
“‘The Tempest’ or The Voice of the Wind” after William Shakespeare, directed by Omar Porras – Teatro Malandro, Théâtre Kléber-Méleau, Renens (VD), until October 13, 2024 (full); then on tour at the Théâtre de Carouge (GE), from March 28 to April 17, 2025, and at the Théâtre Equilibre-Nuithonie, Fribourg, on May 7 and 8, 2025.
