Rarely can Prospero's island have seemed less enchanted or enchanting than as conceived by director Michael Boyd in his down-to-earth yet up-in-the-air production of Shakespeare's mysterious last romance. Boyd's interpretation, which poses no major new challenges or questions, appears to be based upon a reading of The Tempest as an indictment of colonialism and the achieving of a transference of power. Caliban is oddly played by Geff Francis as a well-dressed, grudge-laden islander, who lacks serious symptoms of savagery or deformity. His jubilant assertion: "This island's mine", closes the production's first half. And at the finale, Caliban is spotlit as he and Malcolm Storry's Prospero, whose rant has been worse than his wrath, stand raptly gazing at each other. A new island order is set to begin.
The production's lack of enchantment and an airy refusal to paint its characters in any colour sharper than light grey are its undoing. Tom Piper's design relies upon the Roundhouse's epic dome and circular shape that he fills with next to nothing. Boyd primarily requires us to put our imaginations to work and dream up a magic island ourselves. On the circular stage, a raised boat-deck or platform has been built, which serves as the main playing-area. Prospero's creation of the first-scene's storm is the signal for a rush to panic stations, with sailors symbolically swinging and contorting themselves on the long ladders and ropes that hang from the rafters. The deck itself slightly shivers and slithers.
Storry's uninteresting Prospero looks like a trampish, 17th century bohemian in his maroon dressing gown and wildish hair. He rules the island with a voice that keeps running away with itself in a gabble of furious resentment. Only Sirine Saba's Miranda escapes his anger. From this generalising fury, Storry neither departs nor really develops. His Prospero remains a pain-free
zone. Some kinky fantasising permits Ariel to be played by a woman (Kananu Kirimi), who speaks with dreamy affectation, "I flamed amazement," she says and Miss Kirimi duly overheats most of her emotions, while her magic and her relations with Prospero remain curiously undefined.
Such absence of definition is commonplace. Two rival sets of conspirators intent upon doing down Prospero act their way diffidently along the narrow rim of the circular stage. Brian Protheroe's usurping Duke looks no more dangerous than Simon Gregor's Trinculo is funny - though Roger Frost makes a delightfully bibulous butler. The recurring tableaux of ghostly, green-faced apparitions and of a masque presided over by two drag-queen goddesses neither raised my spirits nor induced those frissons of surprise that this heavy weather Tempest sadly lacks.
The Tempest
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