Shakespeare is inspiration for London 2012 Opening Ceremony

Thank you to our friends at Inside the Games for this article. Let’s hope it is not going to be A Comedy of Errors. I’m sure at won’t be, looking forward to a good Olympics, just 6 months to go – GAMES ON!

By Duncan Mackay at Three Mills Studios in London

One of William Shakespeare's best-known plays, The Tempest, will be the inspiration for the Opening Ceremony of the London 2012 Olympic Games, Oscar-winning director Danny Boyle revealed here today.

A speech by the character Caliban from the 400-year-old play will form the basis for the £27 million ($42 million/€32 million) Ceremony which will be called the Isles of Wonder and feature a giant bell and a group of nurses.

In The Tempest, Caliban is a freckled monster, who believes he is the rightful ruler of a strange island inhabited by the magician Prospero, but Boyle described his speech as "one of the most beautiful" written by Shakespeare.

Caliban's famous speech from Act 3, Scene 2, featured in the Oscar-winning film, the King's Speech, in 2010 when King George VI's speech therapist, Lionel Logue, recited it to his children.
"It is about the wondrous beauty of the island and in this case Caliban's deep, personal devotion and affection for it and that was something we all felt going into the show and wanted to reflect," said Boyle, who won an Oscar for the hit film, Slumdog Millionaire.

The Ceremony will start with the ringing of a giant bell, the biggest in Europe, which is being made by the Tower Hamlets-based Whitechapel Bell Foundry, listed by the Guinness Book of Records as the oldest manufacturing company in Britain whose history dates back to 1420, nearly 200 years before The Tempest was written.

It will inscribed with a line from a speech by Caliban: "Be not afeard, the isle is full of noises".

At an event to coincide with today marking six months to go until the start of the Opening Ceremony, Boyle revealed other themes that would run through the event, including that it would tell the story of how the land that the Olympic Park has been built on had been poisoned by industrial legacy and the way that it has been recovered.

The nurses will appear as a tribute to the National Health Service, an organisation Boyle claimed Britons took particular pride in.

"You sit there when you start this process and you think, 'What is unique about us?'...and you're trying to capture some of that," he said.

"When you see it, it will make sense, I promise."

But Boyle admitted that London had a tough job to rival the spectacular Opening Ceremony staged at the Beijing Olympics four years ago, an event that it is estimated cost more than $100 million (£64 million/€76 million) to produce.

"You are standing on the shoulder of giants when you do this kind of job because you cannot but live in the shadow of your predecessors," he said.

The scale of the Beijing event was "breathtaking" and the "sheer beauty" of Athens in 2004 was "very, very inspiring", he said, but London would take its inspiration from the 2000 Sydney Olympics, an event that represented everything Australian, from sea creatures and flora/fauna to lawn mowers and other Australian cultural icons, including 400 metres runner Cathy Freeman lighting the Flame (pictured).

Sydney has inspired us, because Sydney got the feel of a people's Games right," he added.

"It is inevitable that people will compare us - and that is fine.

"I think there is a sea change and we are lucky enough to be setting it.

"It will be spectacular but the reduction in scale is inevitable."

It was announced in December that the budget for the opening and closing ceremonies had been doubled to £81 million ($127 million/€97 million), after British Prime Minister David Cameron intervened.

Stephen Daldry, the producer of Billy Elliott, who is in charge of all four London 2012 Ceremonies - the Opening and Closing of the Olympic and Paralympic Games - defended the Government's decision.

"Even with the extra investment from Government to the ... 40 million which existed for Ceremonies in the original bid, London will be spending a lot less, considerably less, than was spent in the last two Summer Games," Daldry said.

But for those fortunate enough to get a ticket to the event it is set to be a memorable experience, promised Boyle.

"We wanted to make the feel of the opening ceremony...intimate and personal," he said.

"We didn't want to slavishly be bossed about by the TV audience, which is a billion people and it is not insignificant.

"But we wanted the 80,000 people who were lucky enough to be in there [the Stadium] to be the conduit through which you feel this experience."

More than 10,000 performers have already been recruited for the Ceremonies and more are being sought.

The PA system will be one million watts, and 25,000 costumes will be on display. Up to 900 children, aged seven to 13 (some of whom are pictured with Boyle), from the local Olympic Host Boroughs are also set for a starring role in the Ceremonies.

There are set to be two dress rehearsals in a full Olympic Stadium before the main event, meaning leaks were a risk, and the live ceremony had the "jeopardy" of things going wrong, Boyle admitted.

London 2012 have promised that they will release some details of the Ceremony in the run-up to the Games to give people a flavour of what to expect.

Boyle admitted he would have preferred to keep everything a "surprise" but that is not necessarily possibly in this hi-tech age, especially as there is such interest in it.

There will be a pre-show of about 50 minutes starting at 8.12pm - 20.12 - broadcast inside Britain before the bell opens the ceremony proper at 9pm local time.

Organisers said they hoped to keep it down to three hours, although protocol, including the walk-past of thousands of athletes, meant it would be a tough task.

Boyle has a plan for that.

"[Music directors] Underworld are making sure the marching music is at least 120 beats a minute," he said.

Contact the writer of this story at duncan.mackay@insidethegames.biz