The production which has worked best for me, and which managed to achieve the right balance---where poetry, fantasy, pagentry and humour come together as they should---was that of Ron Daniels for the Royal Shakespeare Company at Stratford in 1982. Here is an island where the sea is an ever-present reality, where the sand is ridged by the outgoing tide, and where the skeletal shapes of earlier wrecks provide the backcloth to the action, with their broken spars and shredded sails.

Prospero is played by a man only in early middle age, Derek Jacobi. "When I was asked to do it," he said, "I thought about it very carefully and then decided that it does in fact make sense. Although Prospero is often played as if he were a very old man indeed, a kind of Patriarchal Magnus, there is no reason why he should be. His daughter is only about fifteen--the text is explicit about that--and he has spent twelve years on the island. She was a child of three, he tells her, when they arrived. Later he speaks of her having been 'a third of his life'. People in Elizabethan days married early anyway, and this would only make him a man in his mid-forties.

"I am sure he is not old in body. I think he has grown old in his mind. His researchings into magic and his workings with the elements have made his brain old. His brain has been under the most tremendous pressure to learn all the secrets of magic, and he has achieved that, but it has almost burned him out. When he talks of being near death, then he is speaking the truth, but it is not a bodily illness--he is dying from the inside. He is a man who is now mortally sick in his head."

When Jacobi speaks the famous 'We are such stuff as dreams are made on...', he emphasizes the 'we' very strongly. Was Prospero in fact saying that just as the visions he has conjured up, or Shakespeare the characters he has created, are the figments of a human imagination then man himself is a Divine dream? Jacobi thinks this is so. "I think Prospero has come to believe this himself and that he has found it deeply upsetting. He has achieved this awesome power by his working in magic, yet perhaps after all it is not as he thought. He is most deeply disturbed.

"What has begun to obsess me as I play the part more often is what appears to be an almost prophetic vision of Shakespeare's which is now applicable to our own time. In that same speech where he talks of our revels being ended, he continues, saying that all they have seen has now 'melted' into thin air, those cloud-capp'd towers and gorgeous palaces, 'the great globe itself Yea, all which it inherit, shall dissolve, And, like this insubstantial pageant faded, Leave not a rack behind...' Why should he use such a strange word as 'dissolve', that the whole world should dissolve? Did he, in some nightmare, look and see our future before us? For if we do end this world in a nuclear war than that is exactly what will happen. Our great globe will dissolve, we human beings will just melt and what is a 'rack'? A rack is a little wisp of cloud. It will all vanish like a dream, and all that will be left of man and his achievements is that tiny wisp of cloud.

"For underpinning the magic and the beauty of 'The Tempest' is the other side of man, Caliban, the side that is evil, and that cannot be taught good. This is something Prospero recognizes when he actually says 'this thing of darkness I acknowledge mine.' A little earlier he has said to Ariel 'We must prepare to meet with Caliban'. What a strange thing to say. We know he has been meeting Caliban all the time for fifteen years, but this time it is as if he has to force himself to formally confront just what Caliban is, that other side of man. Caliban is always there, the thing of Darkness throbbing away under the surface in man, the evil about which we appear able to do nothing. Even when Caliban says to Prospero 'you gave me language' you can feel this has been a mixed blessing, this ability to communicate. It is most relevant, I think, that this formal confrontation comes immediately after the speech about dissolution."

Certainly by the end of this production you felt that this Prospero had reached the end of everything and that Shakespeare, as a playwright, is asking, pleading with the audience to be allowed to go. One writer who saw this production too said to me that he had never before felt so directly addressed by the author himself. As Derek Jacobi says, "If you take the view that Prospero was Shakespeare's own farewell to the theatre, as many people do, then this is a logical assumption from the words he is given to speak. Shakespeare, after all, wasn't really all that old when he died, even by Elizabethan standards; but that tremendous outpouring, that vast imagination, had exhausted him. He had nothing left to say and he knew it. At the end of the play, he says 'Let your indulgence set me free.' It is the most daunting of roles to undertake."