Tempest inspired title of ceremony - The Press Association

(UKPA) – 1 hour ago 

A line from Shakespeare's The Tempest sparked Oscar winner Danny Boyle's imagination for the title of the opening ceremony for the London 2012 Olympics.

He calls it the Isles of Wonder, inspired from a speech in the play.

In Act 3, Scene 2, Caliban says: "Be not afeard; the isle is full of noises / Sounds, and sweet airs, that give delight and hurt not. / Sometimes a thousand twangling instruments / Will hum about mine ears; and sometime voices / That, if I then had waked after long sleep / Will make me sleep again; and then in dreaming / The clouds methought would open, and show riches / Ready to drop upon me, that when I waked / I cried to dream again."

Boyle, the opening ceremony artistic director, said: "Our Isles of Wonder salutes and celebrates the exuberant creativity of the British genius in an opening ceremony that we hope will be as unpredictable and inventive as the British people."

His vision for the opening began with the stadium in east London and the reclaimed land it stands on.

Boyle said: "We based that on the speech in The Tempest. It is an amazing speech about the wondrous beauty of an island. We wanted to convey that and the starting point of that is the stadium.

"It is not spectacular on the outside like Beijing but it is like a porcelain bowl inside. It is 80,000 people, the same size as Beijing, but it is about half the footprint. They have designed it so that it is just people - there is nothing else.

"You get this intimacy when you are in it. You can see people's faces opposite you and that was key for us. We wanted to make it feel intimate and personal. We did not want to be slavishly bossed about by the TV audience, which is more than a billion and not insignificant.

"We wanted the 80,000 people who are lucky enough to be in there to be the conduit from which you can feel the imagery and through which we welcome the athletes to London for the third time."

London also hosted the Games in 1908 and 1948.

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