Mamma Mia!, the 1999 jukebox musical constructed across the songs of the pop workforce ABBA, become an enormous hit within the theatre the world over and later a commercially a success characteristic movie. It has impressed a bunch of spinoffs together with a prequel movie, an immersive eating enjoy and fan fiction.
What if I instructed you that it is also Shakespeare’s The Tempest in hide?
Each Mamma Mia! and The Tempest centre round a unmarried mum or dad determine – Donna, Prospero – who lives on a fable Mediterranean island. As the wedding in their handiest daughter – Sophie, Miranda – approaches, the parental determine encounters other people from their previous and difficult relationships from a era in the past. They have got to select whether or not to transport on emotionally, whether or not to be beneficiant and forgive.
Each folks concoct an incredible efficiency to have fun their daughter’s marriage ceremony, one that incorporates making a song, dancing, and razzle dazzle costumes. Donna and the Dynamos (Donna’s buddies Tanya and Rosie) strut their stuff to Tremendous Trouper, as the ladies used to do of their early life. Prospero commissions his spirit Ariel to degree a masque, with making a song, dancing nymphs and reapers and 3 Roman goddesses – Juno, Iris and Ceres.
This newsletter is a part of Rethinking the Classics. The tales on this collection be offering insightful new tactics to take into accounts and interpret vintage books and works of art. That is the canon – with a twist.
One of the crucial emotionally impactful moments in Mamma Mia! is when Donna sings ABBA’s “Slipping Through My Fingers” as she is considering her daughter’s coming near near marriage. Within the theatre, the target audience all at once shift equipment. One minute they’re a singalong, dancing, glad crowd. The following they’re collapsing in a sobbing heap.
The ephemerality of all human relationships additionally haunts considered one of The Tempest’s maximum well known speeches, Prospero’s “our revels now are ended”. Rapidly curbing the marriage masque he commissioned the spirit Ariel to degree, Prospero displays:
We’re such stuffAs goals are made on, and our little lifeIs rounded with a nap
And Prospero particularly created the eponymous tempest in order that Prince Ferdinand could be shipwrecked at the island and Miranda may fall in love with and marry him. As Prospero says:
I’ve achieved not anything however in care of theeOf thee, my expensive one, thee, my daughter
However that act of care guarantees that Miranda will transfer on, leaving Prospero at the back of.
In the event you take a look at The Tempest with Mamma Mia! in thoughts, it turns right into a play about circle of relatives. These days, the core of The Tempest is generally observed to be the grasp and slave courting or the ability members of the family and hierarchies related to colonisation. And there’s no Ariel or enslaved Caliban determine in Mamma Mia!
And but it’s extensively approved that the musical The Lion King – directed by way of Julie Taymor in a manufacturing that opened in the similar yr as Mamma Mia! – is a makeover of Hamlet, although it’s additionally lacking main characters.
Seeing Mamma Mia! as The Tempest in hide turns out like much less of a achieve when Prospero is performed by way of, or as, a girl. A minimum of as early as 1984, when Valerie Braddell performed Prospero as a mom, ladies had been staking a declare at the position. Extra high-profile, maternal Prosperos have seemed in recent times. Helen Mirren was once obviously a mom, renamed Prospera, in Julie Taymor’s 2010 movie of The Tempest; as was once Alex Kingston on the Royal Shakespeare Corporate in 2023 and Sigourney Weaver on the Theatre Royal, Drury Lane in 2024.
Discovering The Tempest in Mamma Mia! too can assist convey out the queerness of Shakespeare’s play. Mamma Mia! joyfully deploys camp, platform footwear and Lycra. It has one queer male persona in Harry – considered one of Sophie’s 3 imaginable fathers. In The Tempest, Ariel is a gender fluid theatre maker, staging spectacles, making a song songs, enjoying tune at Prospero’s command. He shifts from maleness to look as a feminine harpy, because the goddess Ceres, as a nymph of the ocean, after which again to maleness once more.
Mamma Mia!‘s director Phyllida Lloyd has a history of adapting Shakespeare’s performs to position ladies’s tales centre degree. I’ve explored this in a ebook I wrote with theatre educational David Bullen, Shakespeare within the Theatre: Phyllida Lloyd.
Lloyd’s female-centred variations of Shakespeare may also be observed as early as her 1990 The Iciness’s Story on the Manchester Royal Change, which I want I had observed. And after Mamma Mia! Lloyd grew to become mainstream Shakespeare casting the other way up with an all-female Taming of the Shrew at Shakespeare’s Globe in 2003, starring Janet McTeer and Kathryn Hunter.
Later got here what’s referred to as her all-female “Shakespeare Trilogy”: Julius Caesar in 2012, Henry IV in 2014 and The Tempest in 2016. All 3 of those productions had been carried out as though they had been being staged by way of, and illuminating the tales of, incarcerated ladies.
Mamma Mia! would possibly appear to be the ambiguity on this CV, however glance deeper and also you’ll see it is a part of a continuum. Given Lloyd’s dedication throughout her profession to hijacking Shakespeare with the intention to let ladies’s voices be heard, seeing Mamma Mia! as a remix of The Tempest doesn’t appear so bizarre.
