Crude thinking about Shakespeare production?

Published: 5 August, 2010

• TO follow up to my letter of three weeks ago, reporting the apparent censorship of Gonzalo’s “Utopian” speech in Act II, Scene 1 of The Tempest, the Old Vic management told me it was because the actor was ill that night.

When I reported that a friend told me the speech was still missing on another night, the theatre management changed its tune and said it had been cut for “artistic reasons”.

I will offer the price of a ticket for the show to anyone who can give me the best artistic reason for cutting this wonderfully subversive and comic speech.

I can’t help feeling the reason is political, because I understand this production is to tour in America.

This may be crude thinking, as Brecht called it, but it’s a crude world.

NICHOLAS JACOBS
Lady Margaret Road, NW5