The Tempest
Playwright: William Shakespeare Director: Gregory Doran
Royal Shakespeare Theatre, Stratford-upon-avon (01789-403493) Until 21 January, then Barbican, London, 30 June to 18 August In cinemas on 11 January Running time: 2hrs 43mins (including interval)
For the final show in its season marking the 400th anniversary of Shakespeare’s death, the RSC has pulled off a double coup, said Ian Shuttleworth in the FT. It has broken new theatrical ground by teaming up with Intel and actor Andy Serkis’s Imaginarium Studios to devise an astonishing, spectacular Tempest that uses live “performance capture” technology to create amazing visual effects. And they’ve attracted Simon Russell Beale back to Stratford for the first time in 20 years to play the great magus Prospero. Both these moves have proved a triumph. The “sumptuous” background images range from “naive paintbox landscapes to slavering hounds of hell”, while Ariel (Mark Quartley) wears a motion-capture bodysuit to create spectacular simultaneous CGI footage of him in the forms of a zephyr or a fearsome harpy. Yet “all the silicon in the world is still outshone” by Russell Beale – “the finest Prospero” in living memory.
For me, the hi-tech aspect only partly works, said Dominic Maxwell in The Times. Quartley is a fine Ariel, and the motion-capture sensors on his “skintight onesie” allow his movements and expressions to be transformed into avatars screened on vast cyclinders hanging from the ceiling, to make it seem as if he is “truly flung into the ether, flying”. The problem is that the “blatantly digitised” images are not quite in sync with the actor we see before us. Later, though, the technology triumphs, with a stunning series of “painterly backdrops that possess the whole stage. Flowers sprout. Hills roll.” Added to the pagan beauty of Paul Englishby’s music, the effect is “properly odd and enchanting”. But then again, “no computer program is more evolved than Russell Beale’s easily vivid way with language”.
The “digital wizardry” is thrilling, but Russell Beale is “still the centre of the storm”, agreed Paul Taylor in The Independent. Delivering verse “with a quietly spoken mastery”, he offers up “the most human, complex, and vulnerable Prospero I’ve ever seen”. It is “one of the most profoundly moving performances” of this great actor’s career.
CD of the week
Tchaikovsky: String Quartets No. 1 & No. 3, Heath Quartet Harmonia Mundi £11.75 A fine debut from four “outstanding young British musicians”. In the “masterpiece” Third Quartet, they “pour out Tchaikovsky’s grief” with “a depth of tone and virtuosity” to match the finest Russians on disc (Sunday Times).