Hag-Seed
The Tempest Retold
The Tempest restaged inside a prison by a theatre director whose own bitter exile makes the revenge plot uncomfortably personal.
Atwood’s contribution to the Hogarth Shakespeare series retells The Tempest as a prison drama. A theatre director ousted from his own festival takes a job teaching Shakespeare to inmates and stages the play as revenge on the men who removed him. The doubling is neat, and the prisoners’ readings of Caliban carry more weight than the frame around them.
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