STAGING A COMEBACK: Former Roundhouse squatter stars at venue with RSC
Published: 31 May, 2012
by TOM FOOT
Jonathan Slinger squatted in the old Roundhouse building during a two-week long acid house rave in the early 1990s.
Twenty years later, he returns to the venue as the leading light of the Royal Shakespeare Company.
The coming-of-age story is all the more apparent as the 39-year-old plays Prospero in The Tempest.
He says: “Every time I come back here I think about the old Roundhouse – and the Spiral Tribe rave. One guy got up onto the roof rafters and fell. He died and the police shut it down.”
“The venue may not have that rawness anymore. But it has always been there at the start of things, going right back to the 1960s. I think that comes across when you go into the building.”
In the play, the dark arts master Prospero uses his spell-binding powers to captivate and control anyone who enters his magical island realm.
It was Shakespeare’s last solo effort and the rousing farewell and epilogue of his embodiment, Prospero, doubles as the playwright’s final sign-off from the Globe Theatre. Slinger, 39, says: “The part is usually cast at a man at the end of his life, but actually there is nothing in the text to say Prospero is old. ”
The Tempest has delighted both ends of the political spectrum. Coleridge said it was evidence of Shakespeare’s “profound veneration for all the established institutions of society”.
The writer William Hazlitt found in the character of Caliban a defence of the spirit of the French Revolution. But the poet WH Auden had the most insightful interpretation.
He found a hidden lament on Shakespeare’s career – and art itself. Master dramatists may well capture the imagination and enchant a theatre audience – but can they make a difference to people back into the real world?
Is art simply a distraction: just stuff that dreams are made on?
Last summer, it was the Roundhouse that people looked to for comprehension of the rioters – asking whether poetry and art groups for young people could “foster hope”.
Auden, in his The Sea and the Mirror critique, breathed new meaning into some of the play’s best known lines.
In one often quoted passage, the tormented slave, Caliban, talks about how the island spells he is victim to simply transport him into dizzy day dreams that, when he wakes, have no bearing on his harsh reality. He says:
Be not afeard; the isle is full of
noises,
Sounds, and sweet airs, that give
delight and hurt not.
Sometimes a thousand twangling
instruments
Will hum about mine ears; and
sometime voices
That, if I then had waked after long
sleep,
Will make me sleep again; and
then in dreaming,
The clouds methought would open,
and show riches
Ready to drop upon me, that when
I waked
I cried to dream again.
A giant bell inscribed with the passage “be not afeard, the isle is full of noises” will be rung at the start of the Olympic ceremony. This grand spectacle – the brainchild of Somers Town and Slumdog Millionaire director Danny Boyle – is costing £27million to stage.
The RSC run at the Roundhouse – named What Country Friends is This? – is part of the World Shakespeare Festival which itself, as Slinger says diplomatically, is “something they are calling the Cultural Olympiad”.
Living in Stoke Newington, after moving to London in the early 1990s, the young actor has been with the RSC for eight years.
He has played many major roles for the country’s most prestigious Shakespeare troupe and appeared in major films including alongside Heath Ledger, in the Dark Knight Batman adaptation.
He says: “The Tempest is a brilliant play, but out of all that I’ve done Richard II is the best character. Richard starts off in one place and ends up in a completely different place. That development makes the perfect part and a very rewarding one, for an actor to play. Richard III is also a great part to play but essentially he says at the start I am a bastard and he stays that way all the way though.”
He will play a small part in The Comedy of Errors and also Malvolio, one of the lead roles in Twelfth Night, which he said the company would be bringing crashing into the modern age. “We’re taking an outrageous approach to the yellow stockings,” he adds. “You will have to come and see.”
• The World Shakespeare Festival at the Roundhouse will include performances of The Comedy of Errors, (starting June 1), Twelfth Night ( June 5), The Tempest (June 9) and The Dark Side of Love ( June 26), 0844 482 8008, boxoffice@roundhouse.org.uk