SLAPSTICK AND SORCERY: A SPELLBINDING LAST ACT FROM A SUPERSTAR DIRECTOR
HIS revels now are ended. Dominic Dromgoole is hanging up cloak and wand, having worked much rough magic as artistic director of Shakespeare’s Globe over the past 11 years.
Taking over from Mark Rylance in 2005, he augmented the theatre’s hugely popular Shakespeare productions with a vigorous programme of new writing — including Jessica Swale’s Nell Gwynn, now starring Gemma Arterton in the West End.
His directorial style is typified by this robust new production of Shakespeare’s drama about the shipwrecked magus, Prospero, getting even with the men who deposed him as Duke of Milan.
Often taken as a Shakespeare self- portrait, Tim McMullan presents Prospero as an irascible, orotund loner.
Far from flattering the Bard, he is so wrapped up in his dark arts that he is a legend in his own doublet, oblivious of his own daughter.
McMullan’s Prospero leaves an all too familiar parent-gap in the life of Phoebe Pryce (daughter of Jonathan) as the artless teenage daughter Miranda. Dad might as well be on his iPad as at his conjuring.
But the production is most memorable for its more mischievous elements — most notably with the often stultifyingly unfunny slapstick of drunkards Stefano and Trinculo.
Here, they are saved by Trevor Fox as a sozzled old gent, and Dominic Rowan as a staggering clown adding modern gags of his own.
There is a hint of antiApartheid politics in the casting of black actor Fisayo Akinade as Prospero’s slave Caliban, but there is no serious challenge to Prospero’s white supremacism.
Instead, Dromgoole is more concerned with catching the enchantment woven by Pippa Nixon as Prospero’s airborne servant Ariel.
She is an androgynous creation, casting spells on her master’s shipwrecked enemies and hypnotising them with ethereal song, backed by Stephen Warbeck’s throbbing and tinkling score.
Dromgoole’s broad directorial style may be better suited to the bigger canvas of the main stage than the ornate shoebox that is the Sam Wanamaker studio; and the show could benefit from more light than is allowed by the now default use of candles.
But this is a fond farewell — and his successor Emma Rice will find Dromgoole a hard act to follow.