General · EdgepediaOctober 3, 202610 min read

The Tempest (1979 film)

The Tempest is a 1979 British film directed by Derek Jarman, an unconventional adaptation of William Shakespeare's play of the same name, starring the poet Heathcote Williams as Prospero, Toyah Willcox as Miranda, Karl Johnson as Ariel, and Jack Birkett as Caliban.¹ It was Jarman's third feature, shown at the Berlin Film Festival in 1979 after his first two films, Sebastiane (1975) and Jubilee (1977).² Praised by British critics but damaged in the United States by a hostile New York Times review, the film later developed a cult following and is now regarded as a significant work of queer cinema.³^•⁴

Key fact	Detail
Director and writer	Derek Jarman (direction and adaptation), from Shakespeare's play⁵
Production	Kendon Films/Mainline Pictures, UK, 1979; produced by Guy Ford and Mordecai Schreiber; cinematography by Peter Middleton; music by Brian Hodgson and John Lewis¹^•⁵^•⁶
Principal cast	Heathcote Williams (Prospero), Toyah Willcox (Miranda), Karl Johnson (Ariel), Jack Birkett (Caliban), Peter Bull (Alonso), Elisabeth Welch (a Goddess)¹
Running time	95 minutes, in color⁵
Setting	Shot on location at Stoneleigh Abbey in Warwickshire, giving the film a dark, gothic tone in place of the play's tropical island⁶^•⁴
US release	1980, by World Northal Corp.; reviewed devastatingly by Vincent Canby in The New York Times on 22 September 1980¹^•³
Distinction	The first sound film rendition of Shakespeare's The Tempest³

Spoilers

Plot

The island of Shakespeare's play becomes Stoneleigh Abbey, a crumbling gothic pile of stone corridors, candlelight, and sea-damp. The film opens with the storm. Prospero (Heathcote Williams), the exiled Duke of Milan, conjures it, and a ship carrying the King of Naples, Alonso (Peter Bull), his brother Sebastian, Prospero's treacherous brother Antonio (Richard Warwick), and the counselor Gonzalo (Ken Campbell) is wrecked. The survivors wash up on the island and wander the mansion as though it were a haunted hotel, splitting up in the dark, marveling at the strange music that follows them through the corridors. Prospero, watching from the shadows with Ariel at his elbow, has arranged all of it: this is the revenge he has been planning since his brother usurped him and set him adrift with the infant Miranda.

Prospero lives in the mansion with his daughter Miranda (Toyah Willcox) and two servants. Ariel (Karl Johnson) is a spirit in a white boiler-suit and gloves who functions as the technician of Prospero's experiments. Caliban (Jack Birkett), the dispossessed original owner of the island, is a grotesque who sucks raw eggs and slouches through the lower rooms. Prospero's study is full of books and instruments; his magic is less spectacle than weather, raised in long stone halls lit by hand.

The first piece falls into place when Ferdinand, Alonso's son (David Meyer), is separated from the rest and led to Prospero's cell. Miranda, who has never seen another young man, wakes into a world of strangers and falls on Ferdinand with the raw curiosity and adolescent want of a teenager, declaring him a thing of beauty. Prospero feigns hostility, puts Ferdinand to work carrying logs, and watches the courtship bloom exactly as he intended. It is his experiment in letting love, rather than vengeance, do the work.

Meanwhile the lower rooms belong to Caliban. Two survivors of the wreck, the drunken sailors Trinculo and Stephano, stumble into his territory, and Caliban befriends them, promising to lead them to Prospero so they can murder him and seize the island. The trio staggers through the mansion in a slapstick rebellion, plotting regicide with wine bottles and bad poetry. The courtiers, for their part, plot too: Antonio and Sebastian consider killing Alonso in his sleep, only to be interrupted by Ariel's spirit-music and harpy-style apparitions that drive them mad with guilt.

The film's most notorious scene comes early, in flashback. Sycorax, the dead witch and Caliban's mother (Claire Davenport), an obese and monstrous figure, nurses her adult son at her breast while trying to physically enslave a nude Ariel. The 1979 male full-frontal nudity would have been more shocking then, but the flashback still delivers a jolt to modern viewers, and it establishes the film's whole register: Shakespeare's backstories rendered as body horror, the island's history of enslavement made flesh.¹⁸

The ending is the scene everyone remembers, and it is one of the great scenes in British cinema. Instead of the play's formal epilogue, Jarman stages a lavish wedding ball inside the mansion for Ferdinand and Miranda, with King Alonso in attendance. The masque of the play's three goddesses is combined into a single figure: Elisabeth Welch, then 75 years old and credited only as "A Goddess," in a shimmering gold costume, singing "Stormy Weather" while surrounded by sailors dancing the hornpipe and scattering confetti.¹⁹ The song is literally about weathering a tempest, and it reframes the entire film as Prospero's dream of release rather than his revenge. Welch sings it directly into the camera while the court looks on, dissolving the magician's power in front of the audience exactly what the epilogue does in verse. Critics have called it probably the strangest ending to any Shakespeare play in history.²⁰

After the ball, Prospero forgives his brother and the other conspirators, renounces his magic, and frees Ariel. The island dissolves back into the study, where Ariel soothes his master with his voice as the spirit prepares to depart, and Prospero's narration addresses the viewer directly.²¹ The last image belongs to Miranda, waking into a world of strangers, giving the ending a forward-looking warmth the verse only gestures at.

Characters

Prospero (Heathcote Williams) is played as a tired, ironic magician rather than a thundering one, a sardonic researcher whose low delivery suits the film's mood and whose forgiveness of Antonio registers more as an idea than a felt transformation. His relationship with Ariel is ambiguous and homoerotically charged, power oscillating between master and slave.²²

Miranda (Toyah Willcox) is the standout performance: fresh and feral, all raw curiosity and adolescent want, she turns the play's thinnest major character into the person you watch. The role earned her a Best Newcomer nomination at the Evening Standard Film Awards, though it was already her fourth film.²³

Ariel (Karl Johnson) wears a white boiler-suit and gloves, a laboratory assistant working at an atomic reactor, longing above all to be let go.²² Caliban (Jack Birkett) is a raw, grotesque, egg-sucking monster so memorable that Jonathan Miller cast him as Thersites in his BBC Troilus and Cressida (1981).²⁴ Alonso (Peter Bull), Antonio (Richard Warwick), Gonzalo (Ken Campbell), and Ferdinand (David Meyer) round out the castaways, and Elisabeth Welch appears as the Goddess.¹⁹

Interpretations and controversies

The film is fairly faithful in language and story but reframed as a revenge story with the grotesqueries amplified into a queer punk spectacle.²⁰ Its reception split catastrophically by country: Vincent Canby of the New York Times called it "a fingernail scratched along a blackboard," a review that effectively killed the film's chance of a wider American audience and devastated Jarman, pushing him toward music videos. In Britain, Alan Brien of the Sunday Times called it "one of the most original and masterly films ever made in Britain." Jarman got his revenge in Caravaggio (1986), where the character Giovanni Baglione denounces Caravaggio's work as "unbearable, a fingernail scratched along a blackboard."²⁵

Production

Jarman had wanted to film The Tempest for several years before making it in 1979, and his conception of Prospero drew on the Elizabethan astrologer and alchemist John Dee, whom Shakespeare's magician is widely thought to be based on.⁷ Funding came from private sources, in the case of this film from the maverick producer Don Boyd, and the picture was made on a characteristically tiny budget.⁸^•⁹

With limited money, Jarman shot the film in and around Stoneleigh Abbey in Warwickshire.⁴ This choice replaced Shakespeare's remote, exotic island with an abandoned English manor and gave the film a dark, gothic atmosphere.⁴^•¹⁰ The storm was shot in externals in the manner of a documentary and given an oneiric dimension through blue filters.¹¹

The casting was deliberately unorthodox: the English poet Heathcote Williams, an unusually young professional magician by background, played Prospero; the rock star Toyah Willcox played Miranda; and the American-born, British-based singer Elisabeth Welch appeared as a goddess.¹^•⁹

Relation to Shakespeare's text

Jarman adapted the text heavily, cutting many lines and reordering scenes.⁴ The film anticipates the presentation of Caliban, delays Prospero's telling of the background story, and repeatedly overturns the order of the characters' lines; it also adds scenes, including a dialogue between Miranda and Ariel, who never speak to each other in the play.¹² Like Peter Greenaway's later Prospero's Books (1991), it depicts characters and events, such as Sycorax and Prospero's wife, that the play mentions only in Prospero's narration.¹² Despite these changes, one contemporary reviewer, Martyn Auty in the Monthly Film Bulletin, called it an "admirably edited but surprisingly faithful adaptation," and the film largely avoids the stylistic excesses of Jarman's two previous features.¹

Queer reading and interpretation

Scholars have read the film as a subversive rewriting of the play in service of Jarman's gay politics, set against British counterculture in the 1970s.¹³ In this reading, Caliban is characterized as non-racialized, non-threatening, and essentially human, and Caliban and Ariel are contrasted as conflicting sexual tendencies within Prospero, interiorizing the action in his mind as an allegory of the release of homoerotic desire.¹³ Archival research has also traced the influence of Pier Paolo Pasolini on the film's aesthetics, particularly Salò, or the 120 Days of Sodom (1975); Jarman referred to the project in his notes as "Shakespeare's Salò."¹⁴

Reception

British critics praised the film's fresh approach to familiar material, but its American reception collapsed after Vincent Canby's review in The New York Times of 22 September 1980, which destroyed any chance the film had of finding an international audience and blunted the box-office momentum from Sebastiane and Jubilee.¹³^•³ On the review aggregator Rotten Tomatoes the film holds a Tomatometer score of 60 percent from five reviews.¹⁰

The film's reputation has since recovered. The BFI describes it as Jarman's brooding, darkly symbolic third feature, considered by some the most evocative Shakespeare adaptation ever to reach the screen.⁹ Its celebrated climax, in which Elisabeth Welch sings "Stormy Weather" to a chorus line of sailors as part of a wedding-feast production number, has been called one of the great scenes in contemporary British cinema.⁶ The finale expands Shakespeare's masque into a modernized Elizabethan spectacle, a quality the film shares with the unmade Tempest project of the filmmaker Michael Powell, whose work Jarman admired and whose project he said he had in some way "inherited."¹⁵

Place in Shakespeare on film

Prior to Jarman's film, while an experimental version of Shakespeare was directed by Celestino Coronado in 1976, no sound film of The Tempest had been made; the play had previously inspired only loose adaptations such as the Western Yellow Sky (1948) and the science-fiction film Forbidden Planet (1956).³^•¹⁷ Together with Greenaway's Prospero's Books, Jarman's film stands at either end of the 1980s as a vanguard auteur treatment of the play, and the two are frequently compared in adaptation studies.¹¹ Jarman later broke the magic staff, described as "Prospero's wand, Dee's hieroglyphic monad," that had been used in the film, shortly after his HIV-positive diagnosis in 1986.¹⁶

References

Initially written Oct 3, 2026 · Reviewed: Oct 25, 2026 · Edited: Oct 15, 2026; Oct 25, 2026; Nov 1, 2026