Roberto Andò began to think about staging La tempesta by Shakespeare while he was preparing to film The Prince's Manuscript, dedicated to Tomasi di Lampedusa, identifying a subtle link between Prospero and Don Fabrizio Salina, the protagonist of The leopard.
“I read - he explains - that which Lampedusa himself had written about The tempest in order to explain it to his pupils. He speaks as though it were a last leap of Shakespeare’s imagination, fuelled by an uncontrolled vivacity. The tempest forms part of that anthology of works united by lateness, through which a wide range of very different writers have expressed their own relationship with the world and with time in a dramatic form. But in Shakespeare’s masterpiece, everything appears to be harmonised - it is no coincidence that it is a fable - and the author instils a new spirit of reconciliation and serenity”. In the role of Prospero, Renato Carpentieri, “an actor - the director continues - who has reached the essence of his remarkable talent”.