Word: caliban
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...plot's complications. His long soliloquies demonstrated the remarkable range of control-both as written and performed-that Prospero exercises over the other inhabitants of the island. Holmberg was affectionately tender to his daughter Miranda, firmly in command of the fairy Ariel; angrily severe in his orders to Caliban his slave. His Prospero possessed the strength and virility to make the aging character less concerned with his own leave-taking than with ensuring himself that those around him awake to the significance of their destined relationships in the proper spirit of awe and responsibility...
...show. There is an incident with a white horse, another with a girl, both long ago. There is an anecdote about two old men, deep trouble, silent snowy night, also long ago. The present, for Beckett's tramp, seems a stretch of shingle beach, or a corner in Caliban's cell. There is an outrageously shaggy story about the arrangement of 16 pebbles in four pockets, which grows with mad logic from the very gleam with which MacGowran first so casually confides the notion of his "sucking stones." MacGowran has found, too, Beckett's lilting Celtic love...
Betty Byrne, as Ariel, the "light and airy spirit" who does Prospero's bidding, is active and agile in the part, and Roxana Proser, as Caliban, creates a growling, beastly slave. Kaarel Kaljot, who plays both Antonio and Stephano, the King of Naples' drunken butler is particularly expressive and imaginative in both roles, prancing and reeling as Stephano and striding somberly as Antonio...
...scenes in which Caliban, Stephano, and Trinculo, the King of Naples' drunken jester (slightly overplayed by Dan Hermann), conspire to wrest the island from Prospero's control are especially humorous. Since Bergreen has chosen to direct the play as a comedy, the celebration of Ferdinand and Miranda's marriage in the fourth act, at which Prospero displays his magical powers by creating a host of spirits, is played in a light and frivolous vein, Iris and Ceres reciting their lines like girls in a sixth-grade English class. This parody of the wedding hymn, necessary to maintain the exaggerated acting...
...clubwoman asked him what butterflies were for. Nevertheless, certain deductions can be drawn from Nabokov's writing. In Bend Sinister, he composed a picture of crude, lumpish evil-in-power, and he put Yeats' much quoted "rough beast" into a Bolshevik or Nazi Bethlehem. Thus Prospero-Nabokov always knew Caliban, whether he was known as Hitler or Stalin or by some other name...