The Tempest

There wasn’t a single person at my secondary school whose name was Henry, but there was this guy who wore red and green nail polish. His name was Tim and I remember that he alone among our year wanted to be an actor and intended to go to drama school as soon as A-levels were out of the way.

So when the English teacher decided that the sixth form would put on a production of The Tempest, Tim was chosen to play the lead role: It seemed fair as no-one else had a clue about acting, especially the English teacher. However, he did have a great idea for the staging, choosing the main assembly room and devising the play to be performed in the round using the balcony above for all of Arial’s interventions. His masterpiece however, was to cast the school’s outcasts as pirates and stage a spectacular storm and shipwreck in the courtyard outside that could be viewed through the glass windows that ran the length of the Hall at the start of the evening.

The storm effect was achieved with some audacious lighting and inspired performances from the school orchestra and a full size skeletal ship was sculptured by the woodwork department. As this was Ken and his gang’s only, albeit brilliant, appearance in the play, they were then free to go home and thus they avoided watching Tim’s masterful yet academic rendition of Prospero. In fact they avoided most things at school and became infamous for continued absence from all sport activity, never once doing anything but wandering the woods that boarded the playing fields and smoking during our six years at the school.

I myself was cast as Caliban and everyone, Shakespeare included, seemed to be unclear of my exact role. Monster was the closest direction I received but the makeup department provided me with a pot of instant tanning lotion, some sackcloth and repeated backcombing of my long hair. Even though I was unsure who or what I was playing, I think I looked brilliant and recall it as one of my finest theatrical achievements.

I developed a satisfying grunt to build the character and my finest moment came in the second performance in a one to one scene with Prospero. Tim, budding thespian, messed up his lines and gave me a cue for the line I had just delivered. He looked confused, as well he should have been, but I saved the day, his reputation and future career and that of the school’s by instantly improvising a series of method acting grunts and groans that continued until Tim realised his error, composed himself and returned to the script. Nobody, not even the English teacher was aware that anything had gone astray.

Shortly after the exams arrived, A-levels were obtained or failed and we went our separate ways to uncertain futures. I never saw Tim again, my last memory of him was during the maths exam when my worried reading of the questions was brutally interrupted by his swearing as he stood up and stomped out of the room. But Caliban is alive and well under a freeway bridge here in Seattle.

That's a real Volkswagen Beetle under his hand.