Prospero's Books

Prospero's Books (1991) is Peter Greenaway's fantasia on Shakespeare's The Tempest, and it's yours to watch online on iFILM. Exiled from Milan, the duke Prospero lives out his days on a remote island with his daughter, the spirit Ariel and a magic hidden inside twenty-four books.

Greenaway treats the Bard's final play less as an adaptation than as an overflowing vision. John Gielgud, then in his eighties, speaks nearly every line himself, voicing all the characters at once — Prospero is literally writing the story as it unfolds. Each enchanted volume gets its own passage: a book of water, a book of mirrors, a book of the dead, layered with calligraphy, painting and early digital imaging stacked over the frame. Nude figures drift through the compositions like a slow ballet, Michael Nyman supplies the score, and Sacha Vierny shapes the light.

This one is deliberately excessive and not for everyone — the flood of images matters more than plot, and plenty of viewers won't make it to the end. But for anyone who loves theatre, baroque spectacle and formal experiment, Greenaway delivers something that exists nowhere else. A young Mark Rylance, a future Oscar winner, turns up among the cast. Stream Prospero's Books online on iFILM.