There was a genteel brouhaha last year — leaders in the Times, letters to the Telegraph, tutting in the galleries — about the British Museum’s decision to play Pan-pipe music into its exhibition Celts: Art and Identity. Did the gold torcs and coin hoards sparkle the more for the looped song of Pan-pipes? Not really, and it didn’t half annoy visitors.
Not put off by the British Museum’s Pan-pipe complaints, Compton Verney in Warwickshire has been at the jukebox for its Shakespeare in Art: Tempests, Tyrants and Tragedy. The exhibition takes Caliban’s ‘the isle is full of noises’ literally, giving us wishy-washy wave sounds and shiver-me-timbers deck-creaking for The Tempest, recordings of Ophelia’s mad, mournful singing and Gertrude’s ‘there is a willow grows’ speech for Hamlet, chirruping birds for A Midsummer Night’s Dream and plingy-plangent lute music for the history plays. In one unfortunate spot you hear birds, Gertrude and lute all together.
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