The Tempest

For the archive, we have filed our reviews of several productions of Shakespeare's Tempest on this one page. Scroll down for the one you want, or just browse.

RSC - The Pit
Autumn 1999

The Royal Shakespeare Company's small-scale production, designed for touring after brief London and Stratford runs, has a great deal of charm and inventiveness that many more elaborate stagings lack. Foremost among its virtues is Philip Voss's no-larger-than-life-size, human and benign Prospero.

Taking his clue from the background that Prospero was a scholar happier in the library than the throne, Voss gives us a gentle, loving father just this side of being an absent-minded academic. His normal mode is intimate and conversational, making his few lapses into high anger all the more frightening.

Voss's best moments are subtle and underplayed - the raised eyebrow or contented smile as he watches Miranda and Ferdinand fall in love, the totally believable father's paranoia that the teenagers will turn randy if he takes his eyes off them for a moment. (I've always thought that one of Shakespeare's slyest jokes is that, when he does leave them alone for a while, all they do is play chess.)

Equally strong and equally unconventional is Zubin Varla's very human and therefore very sympathetic Caliban. With only a slight twisting of the body and roughness of speech to suggest his monstrousness, this Caliban clearly has a legitimate case against Prospero. (Unlike some recent productions, this one doesn't stress the anti-colonialist interpretation, but leaves it quietly implicit.)

Varla's more human playing also helps make the comic scenes, too often unbearably unfunny, some of the high points of this version. Aided by James Saxon's rotund Stephano and Julian Kerridge's overage-schoolboy Trinculo, Varla makes comic gems out of Caliban's amazement at suddenly finding himself a four-legged animal and delight at discovering the wonders of wine.

Not all works in James Macdonald's production. Gilz Terera is a nonentity as Ariel, with no sense of either the character's magic or his rebelliousness. Nikki Amuka-Bird catches a few bright flashes of Miranda's discovery of love, but for the most part she and Oliver Dimsdale as Ferdinand are wooden, as are most of the shipwrecked court.

Though the masque scene delightfully draws the young lovers in to a magical dance number, most of Orlando Gough's music incongruously strains for Cleo Laine-type jazziness. Jeremy Herbert's set, an undulating white surface that allows the magical spirits to seem to float in air, doubles as a screen for his evocative video projections.

This is inventive, non-traditional stagecraft that doesn't show off, but, like the low-key playing of the leads, aptly serves this modest and evocative interpretation of the play.

Gerald Berkowitz

Shakespeare's Globe
Summer 2000

The replica of Shakespeare's original theatre opened three years ago with the hope of helping actors and audiences rediscover the plays through performances in their original setting. For the most part that hope hasn't been realized, as actors and directors struggle to find the right performance style for a large open stage with half the audience standing around it and no roof to keep out the elements or aircraft noises.

The current production of The Tempest is no exception, with a jumble of performance styles, none of which really work, and no real magic, romance or poetry in its story of the magician-duke banished to an enchanted isle, who uses his powers to gain revenge on his enemies and find a husband for his daughter.

What it has is a real star, Vanessa Redgrave, though in a very muted performance as Prospero, and occasional flashes of cleverness in the comic playing.

Redgrave makes no gimmick out of the cross-gender casting, playing Prospero as a bluff and masculine man, like the country squire her brown-and-leather costume suggests. She growls her lines in a baritone designed to fight any hints of poetry, and is generally laid-back and naturalistic, except for an occasional broad aside to the audience.

How to deal with that audience is one of the Globe's challenges. Some try a very broad "We know you're there and we're going to involve you" approach. Caliban (Jasper Britton) plays some lines to individual groundlings, while Steven Alvey's comic Trinculo practically shouts "Hello boys and girls!" like a character in a Christmas panto. (Oddly, Steffan Rhodri, as his comic partner Stefano, doesn't do the same.)

Some attempt a larger acting style, recalling the grand posing and gestures of the 19th century. Geraldine Alexander's Ariel does that, adding to her vaguely out-of-it otherworldliness. But most, like Redgrave, give essentially the same performance they would give in an ordinary theatre, which isn't quite right for the space either.

The jumble, and a general lack of an overriding vision for the production, suggests a directorial failure. Oddly, the Globe management has chosen to forego directors this season, splitting the job into a Master of Play (Lenka Udovicki) to oversee movement and a Master of Verse (Tim Carroll) to deal with the words. Given that most of the cast stand in one spot and speak their lines lifelessly, the experiment can't be called a success.

There are moments. Though Redgrave does little with one of Prospero's big arias, "Ye elves," she does turn the other, "Our revels now are ended," into an exquisite moment. The clowns are good - I saw it on a very rainy day, and they ad-libbed a lot of funny business about the discomfort of the groundlings. And any real Shakespeare student or fan will want to see a production in the Globe, just to experience the space. You're just not going to find an exciting production of The Tempest here.

Gerald Berkowitz

The Roundhouse
Spring 2002

Michael Boyd's new production for the Royal Shakespeare Company is crisp, clear and always engrossing, illustrating one of the RSC's greatest strengths along with, perhaps, some of its minor weaknesses.

Theatrical history will celebrate the RSC not just for its many individual successes but for its sustained revolution in the speaking of Shakespearean verse. A couple of generations of actors have learned to make Shakespeare sound as clear and natural as contemporary English without losing the poetry, and you need only listen to recordings of the high-poetic but empty recitations of earlier actors to appreciate the difference. (Or you can suffer through non-RSC actors today - a week ago I listened to thoroughly professional actors - no need to name and shame them - turn most of Macbeth into totally unintelligible gabble.)

And so it is to me the highest praise to say that not for a single second in this Tempest do you not know exactly what everyone is saying, what their words mean, why they are saying it, what they are feeling, and where this is taking the plot. For not the first time with the RSC I watched  mildly boisterous school groups in the audience come under the author's spell and follow the play totally engrossed.

If, in the process, a bit of the magic and poetry is lost, or if the very high standard makes you aware of the few cast members who are not quite up to the level of their fellows, or if the emphasis on clarity sometimes leads the actors to subdue passions, these are acceptable trade-offs.

For example, I would have preferred a more exciting opening scene than the rather languid storm and shipwreck Boyd gives us; and, while Kananu Kirimi is a likeably gamin Ariel, I'd wish she were a sufficiently skilled actress that she didn't need amplification to make her voice work in the more magical scenes. And, as with almost every RSC production of the past decade, a bit more sprightly pacing could have cut the running time down to under three hours.

But I wouldn't want any of these changes if they meant losing the power of Malcolm Storry's powerful Old Testament God of a Prospero or Geff Francis's proud and sympathetic Caliban, or of the believable and engrossing psychological journeys we watch their characters take. If Sirine Saba's Miranda is a bit over-ripe and phlegmatic, Alan Turkington makes an attractively heroic Ferdinand and Keith Bartlett as the King and Jerome Willis as Gonzalo score in roles that are not as simple as they look. Roger Frost and Simon Gregor make those two old bores Stephano and Trinculo (surely Shakespeare's dreariest comic characters) as bearable as I can imagine them being, just by not trying over-hard to be funny.

The production makes inventive use of the Roundhouse, with actors moving through the audience as well as the central space, and there's even an aerial ballet left over from the Millennium Dome. But the real power lies in our understanding of the very human story at the core of this and every Shakespeare play, and no one does that better than the RSC.

Gerald Berkowitz

Old Vic Theatre
Spring 2003

Derek Jacobi is an actor of immense charm and a beautiful way with Shakespearean verse. The Tempest is a great play. The combination should be magical, but this touring production directed by Michael Grandage is too much of a hit-and-miss affair to be totally satisfying.

Predictably, Jacobi is at his best in the subtle and unexpected changes he wrings out of overly familiar lines. The 'Our revels now are ended' aria, for example, is too often played for ethereal sweetness, but he makes Prospero suddenly recognise the emptiness of worldly glory in a sad, almost bitter contemptus mundi. He can also be delightful, finding all the comedy in Prospero's absolute conviction that the teenage lovers will be at it if he turns his back on them for a second (It is one of Shakespeare's subtler jokes that when he does leave them alone for a while, all they do is play chess).

But elsewhere in the play Jacobi has been directed against his native strengths. His whole first scene, an extended exposition of the play's back-story, is shouted - not projected, just shouted in a way that reduces it to gabble. In another scene, for no clear reason, he sits upstage in a wooden garden chair, looking like nothing so much as a suburban grandfather snoozing in his back garden.

Sam Callis and Claire Price as the young lovers are not particularly impressive separately but do generate a nice Romeo-and-Juliet sweetness of love-at-first-sight when together. Louis Hilyer brings an attractive energy to Caliban and Daniel Evans keeps Ariel afloat. But the rest of the performances are generic and wooden, with Stephano and Trinculo, Shakespeare's least funny clowns, as dreary as they always are.

There are hints from time to time of a concept or interpretation behind the production - a moment or two suggesting Prospero's need to reintegrate into human society, or an occasional line hinting at the anti-colonial reading (with Prospero guilty of the same usurpation he was victim of). But these are dropped as quickly as they're raised, and the whole production seems to have no point beyond being a showcase for its star - a showcase he is only allowed to take occasional advantage of.

Gerald Berkowitz

Novello Theatre
February-March 2007

So much of the RSC's new Tempest is so very, very good that the occasional lapse into misstep or silliness hardly registers.

This is a production that can be recommended with equal enthusiasm to the first-timer, who will enjoy it, and the veteran, who will appreciate its many original touches.

Foremost among its strengths is Patrick Stewart's Prospero. In place of the too-frequently one-dimensional benign or vengeful old wizard, Stewart and director Rupert Goold have discovered a complex and tormented man.

This Prospero finds doing magic physically painful - it drains him - but giving up his power to rejoin humanity at the end of the play even more difficult. He clearly loves his daughter, but has raised her to obey him like an automaton. He is vicious with John Light's very human Caliban, making the monster's complaints ring true; and though he repeatedly speaks of loving Julian Bleach's Ariel, the coldness of their relationship says something different.

And Stewart makes Prospero vaguely aware of all these contradictions, and a very unhappy man as a result of them, so that his journey through the play will be one of finding a way toward an inner peace.

It goes without saying that Stewart speaks the verse beautifully, never more so than in the climactic farewell to his magic, in which we see him actually seeing the invisible spirits he is setting free and feeling the pain of their departure.

In a very courageous leap by director and actor (which could have gone terribly wrong), Julian Bleach's Ariel is no Disney fairy, but a spectral, ghoulish figure striding morosely through the play. He creates a striking image, and one that contributes to the play's ambiguous and ambivalent concept of Prospero's magic.

Mariah Gale's Miranda is not the usual faceless princess, but a sometimes disconcerting mixture of instinctive imperiousness, social awkwardness and adolescent rebellion. Craig Gazey's wry Trinculo stands out from almost all the others I've ever seen by actually being funny, and James Hayes makes Gonzalo attractive without lapsing into mawkishness.

And yes, there are a few slip-ups. The opening storm scene is notoriously difficult to stage, but this has to be one of the least successful attempts, with the characters merely standing there while speaking of being panicked. The magical feast is replaced by a dead seal (Don't ask), and the masque by some sort of Polynesian fertility ritual. And as interesting as Mariah Gale's Miranda is, the actress is left on her own, performing in an entirely different mode from everyone else.

But ignore them. Focus on the fine performances all around, particularly at the centre, and on the ways they rejuvenate and illuminate this old chestnut of a play, and you'll find this one of the best Tempests ever.

Gerald Berkowitz

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