 Looking for ideas for a new subject, Adès saw Jonathan Kent's staging of Shakespeare's "The Tempest" at the Almeida Theatre in London in 2000.For a new libretto, Adès turned to the experienced dramatist Meredith Oakes, whose work had included a short opera libretto for "Miss Treat" (2002); since the early 1990s, several original plays, translations and adaptations of classics and modern dramas; and, for television, the story line for "Prime Suspect 4" (1995).Rather than transfer Shakespeare's words directly into the libretto, Oakes has taken the approach of reducing much of the text to its essence, and she produces a compact libretto with the bulk of the text presented in the form of rhyming couplets.