Mamma Mia!, the 1999 jukebox musical built around the songs of the pop group ABBA, became a huge hit in the theatre internationally and later a commercially successful feature film. It has inspired a host of spinoffs including a prequel film, an immersive dining experience and fan fiction.
What if I told you that it could also be Shakespeare’s The Tempest in disguise?
Both Mamma Mia! and The Tempest centre around a single parent figure – Donna, Prospero – who lives on a fantasy Mediterranean island. As the marriage of their only daughter – Sophie, Miranda – approaches, the parental figure encounters people from their past and tricky relationships from a generation ago. They have to choose whether to move on emotionally, whether to be generous and forgive.
Both parents concoct a fantastic performance to celebrate their daughter’s wedding, one that includes singing, dancing, and razzle dazzle costumes. Donna and the Dynamos (Donna’s friends Tanya and Rosie) strut their stuff to Super Trouper, as the women used to do in their youth. Prospero commissions his spirit Ariel to stage a masque, with singing, dancing nymphs and reapers and three Roman goddesses – Juno, Iris and Ceres.
This article is part of Rethinking the Classics. The stories in this series offer insightful new ways to think about and interpret classic books and artworks. This is the canon – with a twist.
One of the most emotionally impactful moments in Mamma Mia! is when Donna sings ABBA’s “Slipping Through My Fingers” as she is thinking about her daughter’s impending marriage. In the theatre, the audience suddenly shift gear. One minute they are a singalong, dancing, happy crowd. The next they are collapsing in a sobbing heap.
The ephemerality of all human relationships also haunts one of The Tempest’s most well-known speeches, Prospero’s “our revels now are ended”. Abruptly curtailing the wedding masque he commissioned the spirit Ariel to stage, Prospero reflects:
We are such stuff
As dreams are made on, and our little life
Is rounded with a sleep
And Prospero specifically created the eponymous tempest so that Prince Ferdinand would be shipwrecked on the island and Miranda could fall in love with and marry him. As Prospero says:
I have done nothing but in care of thee
Of thee, my dear one, thee, my daughter
But that act of care ensures that Miranda will move on, leaving Prospero behind.
If you look at The Tempest with Mamma Mia! in mind, it turns into a play about family. Nowadays, the core of The Tempest is usually seen to be the master and slave relationship or the power relations and hierarchies associated with colonisation. And there’s no Ariel or enslaved Caliban figure in Mamma Mia!
And yet it is widely accepted that the musical The Lion King – directed by Julie Taymor in a production that opened in the same year as Mamma Mia! – is a makeover of Hamlet, even though it’s also missing major characters.
Seeing Mamma Mia! as The Tempest in disguise seems like less of a reach when Prospero is played by, or as, a woman. At least as early as 1984, when Valerie Braddell played Prospero as a mother, women have been staking a claim on the role. More high-profile, maternal Prosperos have appeared in recent years. Helen Mirren was clearly a mother, renamed Prospera, in Julie Taymor’s 2010 film of The Tempest; as was Alex Kingston at the Royal Shakespeare Company in 2023 and Sigourney Weaver at the Theatre Royal, Drury Lane in 2024.
Finding The Tempest in Mamma Mia! can also help bring out the queerness of Shakespeare’s play. Mamma Mia! joyfully deploys camp, platform shoes and Lycra. It has one queer male character in Harry – one of Sophie’s three possible fathers. In The Tempest, Ariel is a gender fluid theatre maker, staging spectacles, singing songs, playing music at Prospero’s command. He shifts from maleness to appear as a female harpy, as the goddess Ceres, as a nymph of the sea, and then back to maleness again.
Mamma Mia!‘s director Phyllida Lloyd has a history of adapting Shakespeare’s plays to put women’s stories centre stage. I’ve explored this in a book I wrote with theatre academic David Bullen, Shakespeare in the Theatre: Phyllida Lloyd.
Lloyd’s female-centred adaptations of Shakespeare can be seen as early as her 1990 The Winter’s Tale at the Manchester Royal Exchange, which I wish I had seen. And after Mamma Mia! Lloyd turned mainstream Shakespeare casting upside down with an all-female Taming of the Shrew at Shakespeare’s Globe in 2003, starring Janet McTeer and Kathryn Hunter.
Later came what is known as her all-female “Shakespeare Trilogy”: Julius Caesar in 2012, Henry IV in 2014 and The Tempest in 2016. All three of these productions were performed as if they were being staged by, and illuminating the stories of, incarcerated women.
Mamma Mia! might seem like the anomaly in this CV, but look deeper and you’ll see it is part of a continuum. Given Lloyd’s commitment across her career to hijacking Shakespeare in order to let women’s voices be heard, seeing Mamma Mia! as a remix of The Tempest doesn’t seem so strange.
