PADDY Cunneen was a young man when he first worked on The Tempest, Shakespeare's fantasy island shipwreck adventure of disrupted isolationism. That was at Liverpool's Everyman Theatre in 1984, when, as a fledgling composer, he worked under director Glen Walford, whose vision for the play included setting a largely black cast - with Cathy Tyson in her first major stage role as Prospero's daughter - Miranda, in a circus ring.
More than 20 years on, and following stints on the play with Cheek By Jowl and other acclaimed companies, Cunneen is directing The Tempest in a production for Glasgow's Tron Theatre that looks older and wiser and, with a 17-year-old son who's just flown the nest, sounds born partly from the director's own experience.
"Prospero is almost like a kind of contemporary male role model, " Cuneen says of the play's pivotal character, all too often played as some ancient wizened mystic, but in this production played as a man squaring up to something resembling a mid-life crisis. "He's that kind of unsung hero bloke, the guy who is a good husband who never gets featured, the guy who is a good dad but never gets talked about. The guy who has problems, but who has to adjust and learn how to grow with a lot of children who he's loved as children. These are big emotional issues which men face, but nobody talks about.
"For me, Prospero's magic can't really solve his problem, because the problem is in his psychology and letting go of past injustices. The problem also has to do with the fact that his daughter is 16, and just becoming a woman, and the question then is whether he's going to stay on this island in this male tantrum and state of withdrawal, or is he going to get back in the world. Because, if he doesn't get back into the world now, he's not only going to damage himself, but he's going to damage his daughter.
"Learning to come to terms with his past, learning to, not forgive his enemies, but at least understand them, and learning to be magnanimous enough to let go of his daughter - that's a big journey for a man to make. Prospero describes Miranda as a cherub, and children really are like that. They're fantastic. You have them for 10 or 11 years, then they really turn into something else. The process of letting go of them is really painful."
This is, Cuneen admits, something he has experienced himself. "In your early 40s, the mid-life crisis really bites hard. You have to deal with concepts of who you are and of your own mortality, and of losing these children you've been with their whole lives. As I reached my early 40s, it hit something in me about grieving for the loss of children, even though they aren't dead. They've just turned into people. There's a sense there that one's task is finished, and that one is expendable. Again, that's a contemporary concern, because we don't live socially among families as much as we used to.
"For Prospero it's especially difficult, because the father/daughter relationship is a very special bond. You don't have the issues of sameness. Fathers and sons are the same thing, just 25 or 30 years apart, but here, Miranda has to be allowed to fly."
Given his background as a composer, any other-worldly magic there is in Cuneen's production is likely to come in its soundtrack. As the most intangible but emotive of arts, the musicality inherent in Shakespeare's poetry is a gift.
"The play is an adventure in language, " says a man who clocks the timbre of a newcomer's accent immediately. "Hearing those lines being said in people's natural accents rather than a sort of mannered, whoo-whoo way is exciting on the ear. We had one of the actors record his lines in different ways, then listening to the playback, and the result was fantastic. We're going to try and fill the auditorium with sound in one way or another. There'll be none of the usual thunder and lightning, but seeing people transported by music is a great thrill. The sound of the human voice as well . . . there's nothing more compelling."
One way such transcendence will be created is through the use of a prepared piano, out of which is battered all of Prospero's internal distress. Given that Cuneen describes a tuned piano as "the ultimate rational musical instrument", such an extreme dichotomy is unabashed symbolism. Similar too is Prospero's own sense of exile.
"It's an island, " Cuneen concedes. "I'm much more interested in it as a psychological space. In this production, Prospero won't be like a chess grandmaster, standing outside and moving the pieces to get the resolution he wants. He's going to get his hands dirty by being emotionally involved. He has to realise that Miranda needs to be released into the world to fulfil her potential. Your children don't belong to you. The ultimate thing is to let them go, with love."
The Tempest, Tron Theatre, Glasgow, Thursday until October 28.
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