Every theater season, municipal and state theaters in Istanbul mount a couple of Shakespeare productions with varying degrees of success. This year, the privately owned Moda Sahnesi in Kadıköy has included "The Tempest" in their end of year repertoire, offering a bit of magic this yuletide season.

Moda Sahnesi is a versatile, black box of a theater, allowing directors to play with the parameters of the stage. For "The Tempest," director Kemal Aydoğan has placed the audience on two sides of the stage. As the audience settles into their seats, they see two round screens mounted high on the walls to the right and left, and an eye ball on each, slowly swaying as if at sea. These must represent the all-seeing eye of magician and deposed Duke of Milan Prospero, whose story we have come to watch tonight.

Prospero is the apparent protagonist of "The Tempest," however, any Shakespeare production has to make choices about whose story it wants to tell. Recent productions around the world have focused on the character of Caliban, whom Prospero has found on the island and has enslaved. The play lends itself to very easy postcolonial readings, which this Moda Sahnesi production has completely skirted. When Caliban appears he is very animal-like, using his limbs like an ape, with his mouth continuously open which makes his speech a strange kind of coarse. In a sense, this choice of Caliban can be said to be closer to the original Shakespearean one where he is supposed to represent all that is base and animal in human nature.

The play's "action" starts taking place on the two round screens on the wall, while Prospero and his daughter Miranda watch the goings on from a very dimly lighted stage. We watch an animation depicting a ship in a tempest with superimposed faces of the crew talking wittily about how the elements do not care whether you are an aristocrat or a commoner. The ship contains several noblemen of Italy, and as we can see from Prospero's demeanor and Miranda's supplicant eyes, that it is he who has caused the tempest that will bring these men, including Prospero's treacherous brother, to the island. The film is also interspersed with the gleaming face of a young woman with wild curly hair, quite clearly Ariel, a spirit who helps Prospero do his magic.

The lights come on the "island," and we see both Prospero and Miranda are dressed in light colored clothes, which almost suggests that this "magical" island might be the hereafter. When Miranda asks her father how they came to be on the island, Prospero looks dejected, and it almost runs like a sequence in which the ghost of a daughter is asking the ghost of her father how they came to be dead. The play is filled with scenes in which Prospero philosophizes about kingship in an effort to explain to his daughter how they have ended up in the island. He was too interested in books and scholarship, he says, while his brother created a state within a state, bribing people, replacing Prospero's men with his own and encircling the state like ivy:

"Being once perfected how to grant suits, How to deny them, who to advance and who To trash for over-topping, new created The creatures that were mine, I say, or changed 'em, Or else new form'd 'em; having both the key Of officer and office, set all hearts i' the state To what tune pleased his ear; that now he was The ivy which had hid my princely trunk, And suck'd my verdure out on't."

Hearing these lines spoken in Turkish, one understands, once again, why Shakespeare is timeless and peoples across the globe, and in different periods, have engaged with his work to say something about the world they live in.

Prospero has created his own small commonwealth on the island with Ariel and Caliban doing his work. Having ignored the postcolonial reading of the play, the production also dispenses with the scenes in which Ariel and Caliban exchange notes about what it feels like to be working for Prospero. In Shakespeare's text, Caliban tries to provoke some sense of resentment in Ariel: There is none of that here. Ariel is infantilized, and when she asks for her freedom, is overjoyed like a child when her master says that he will free her in two days. The only line that is delivered with a feeling that approaches anything like discontent is when Ariel says she thought the work would be over by 6 o'clock, and Prospero still orders her about.

Shakespeare's spirits, Ariel among them, give ample scope for interpretation for theater directors. In the Moda production, Aydoğan has put Ariel on roller blades to simulate the swift movement the audience may attribute to spirits. She also has a rather heavy helmet with a camera attached on top, a contraption that gives her powers to communicate with the elements and with Prospero. It is a device that symbolizes her power but also her bondage to her master. Selen Şeşen does a very good job of Ariel within the parameters set by this production. She is a happy sprite, with a good singing voice. She is also pretty versatile on the banjo, as she serenades the shipwrecked nobles alternately to sleep and wakefulness.

The shipwrecked Italians are dressed as members of the Mafia from the waist up, with striped black suits, with the odd choice of knee-length trousers that make them look juvenile. The mafia style works with the Turkish actors, as they look like they could be extras from any Turkish soap opera that has scenes dealing with the criminal world. Kaan Songün who plays Sebastian - the nobleman who is encouraged by Prospero's brother Antonio to depose his own brother, the King of Naples- is very good at looking deceitful stroking his longish beard, looking like he can do very well as one of the baddies in the historical drama "Diriliş Ertuğrul" (popular Turkish TV Series "Resurrection: Ertuğrul). Contrasted to the plotting of these lords, we have Stephano (Gürsu Gür) and Trinculo (Ertürk Erkek), who manage to convey a very truthful and recognizable Turkish drunken lingo.

Despite a number of false notes, including a "drunk revel" scene in which Stephano and Trinculo parade in different clothes, while clips showing autocrats, including Margaret Thatcher play on the two screens, the production never loses its momentum. It takes us to a magical place for the full three hours in dark December, allowing us to appreciate the genius of Shakespeare once again.