Summary
The play assembles the same characters as in Shakespeare's The Tempest, but makes some changes when it comes to casting. In the character list, Césaire writes that Ariel is a mulatto slave and Caliban is a black slave. Additionally, there is a new character, Eshu, who is a "black devil-god."
The play opens with the direction that it has the "ambiance of a psychodrama." A Master of Ceremonies enters the stage, followed by the rest of the cast, and picks a mask for himself, then announces that anyone can play whatever character they want to. He says that he needs a really big storm: "I need a really big guy to do the wind."
Act 1 begins with the eponymous "tempest." Gonzalo suggests they must try and get to the eye of the storm. The Captain worries that the boat will run aground and tells the boatswain to right the course. Gonzalo and Antonio try to ask the boatswain about what is going on, but he advises them to go back below deck. Gonzalo tells him that he is the King's counsellor, and that Sebastian is the king's brother.
The Boatswain does not care and tells them to go away. Suddenly, the boat begins to sing, and the passengers sing "Nearer, my God, to Thee..."
Scene 2. Miranda and her father Prospero are on the shore. Miranda asks Prospero to help the sinking ship. He says, "Come daughter, calm yourself! It's only a play. There's really nothing wrong." She talks about what a fine ship it is and the fine, brave lives onboard. Prospero calls her over and informs her that she was born in Milan, where he was the Duke.
Miranda wants to know how they came to live on the island and how he turned into a "reclusive hermit." He tells her that there were some political disagreements with his brother, Antonio, and "the envious King of Naples," Alonso. He tells her that Antonio became Alonso's accomplice, and Alonso offered him Prospero's throne. In a flashback, we see the Holy Inquisition coming to arrest Prospero for being a "magician and sorcerer."
Prospero tells Miranda that instead of giving him a trial, the authorities sent him away to the island they are now living on. He tells her that only Gonzalo, the King's counselor, was kind to him, providing him with books and instruments so that his life would be a little better on the island. "Fortune has brought to these shores the very men involved in the plot against me. My prophetic science had of course already informed me that they would not be content merely with seizing my lands in Europe and that their greed would win out over their cowardice, that they would confront the sea and set out for those lands my genius had discovered," Prospero says.
Ariel enters and tells Prospero that he successfully sank the ship, but that it was "a real pity to see that great ship go down, so full of life." Prospero fires back, "What interests me is not your moods, but your deeds." Ariel asks him not to ask him to do this kind of labor, but Prospero insists, angry that Ariel would forget how he freed him from a pine tree, from Sycorax, who was holding him hostage. Ariel says, "Sometimes I almost regret it...After all, I might have turned into a real tree in the end..."
Prospero goes to speak to Caliban, whom he thinks is getting a little too "emancipated." When Caliban says "Uhuru," Prospero scolds him for using his native language and calls him an "ugly ape." He tells Caliban that he ought to be grateful to him for teaching him to speak at all, as Caliban insists that the only thing he taught him is to speak in his own language. "What would you be without me?" Prospero wonders, and Caliban replies that he would be the king of the island without him. Prospero talks about Caliban's mother, a witch who he thinks is dead.
Caliban counters, "...you only think she's dead because you think the earth itself is dead...It's so much simpler that way! Dead, you can walk on it, pollute it, you can tread upon it with the steps of a conqueror. I respect the earth, because I know that it is alive, and I know that Sycorax is alive." Caliban says that Sycorax, his mother, often warns him about danger. He also talks about the fact that he taught Prospero all about the region and the natural world there, but that Prospero repaid him by turning him into a slave, comparing his cave to a "ghetto."
Prospero accuses Caliban of raping Miranda, but Caliban insists that he never did.
Analysis
The play begins with the premise of a play with which the audience is already familiar—Shakespeare's The Tempest—but promises to subvert it in certain ways. Written in 1969 by Aimé Césaire, a French writer from Martinique (an island in the West Indies that is part of the French Republic), A Tempest takes some of the themes of race and subjugation that are implicit in Shakespeare's original play, and makes them explicit. He specifies that Ariel and Caliban are "mulatto" and "black" respectively, and introduces a new character, Eshu, who is a god from the Yoruba tradition in Nigeria.
The framing of the play is highly theatrical. A Master of Ceremonies enters the stage and puts on a mask, before inviting the other actors to pick characters and do the same. The masks are a reference to traditional African theater, and contrast with the typical trappings of Western theater that one might see in a more traditional Shakespearean production. This is part of Césaire's efforts to decolonize the play, and make it explicitly a meditation on subjugation and colonial control, rather than simply a fairy tale.
The theatricality of the play becomes meta-theatrical at moments, with the actors fully aware of the artificiality of the circumstances they are playing out onstage. When Miranda begs her father, Prospero, to save the ship they see nearby, he replies with, "It's only a play. There's really nothing wrong." Here, he makes direct reference to the fact that the action of the play is completely made up, not real events. Even as fantastical and intense events continue to happen onstage, the actors themselves and the audience are urged to remember that it is all made up, a representation. This meta-theatricality makes the events more complex; instead of suspending our disbelief entirely in realism, we are meant not only to experience the plot, but to question it and try and understand it from the outside and to analyze its representation.
In this first section, we meet Prospero and his daughter, Miranda. Prospero was once the Duke of Milan, but was exiled to an island by his brother and the King of Naples, who were suspicious of his prophetic powers. Prospero is a magical character, someone with the ability to see the future, and this made him threatening to his court. This conflict, which precedes the action of the play, sets the stage for the conflict to emerge even more intensely within the narrative of the play. Now, all of Prospero's enemies are arriving on his island, and he must figure out how to deal with this sudden invasion.
Ariel and Caliban's enslavement is a part of Shakespeare's Tempest, but in Césaire's play, we see more clearly that they are racialized and subjugated. Ariel is a "mulatto" slave, who has been asking Prospero for his freedom for years to no avail. He begs Prospero to spare him from having to use his magical powers to create tragic events, but Prospero does not want to hear it and insists that Ariel must complete tasks without question. The fact that Ariel has no autonomy over his actions and his magical powers strikes a different note in this version, in which we know him to be a biracial individual serving a white master. The servitude is not simply of a fantastical nature, but a political one, in which a white colonial invader takes control of the life of a non-white magical being on the island to which he was banished. This turns the whole play on its head, transforming the protagonist of the play into an antagonist.
