Prospero’s Tempest is a techno triumph
The Tempest (Royal Shakespeare Theatre, Stratford-upon-Avon) Verdict: Stratford-upon-Avatar
GORGEOUS colours abound in the Royal Shakespeare Company’s new Tempest. The very stage floor glows with rainbow blues and yellows and indigos, generated by some of the most satisfyingly artistic computerisation yet seen.
To the eye, at least, Shakespeare’s magical island throbs with wonderment. In the middle of all this digitised cleverness stands Simon Russell Beale’s Prospero, his soft-spoken melancholy a striking contrast to the visual fireworks. He delivers the lines with the most delicate clarity — forlornness sotto voce, a lesson to lesser actors that you do not need to bawl and gurn and prance in order to convey turmoil.
The slightest tweak of the neck and a fretful feathering of one hand behind the back will do it.
From my final-preview perch at the back of the Circle, I could not see all of the modcon graphics, some of them projected on to chimneys of silk lowered from on high. C’est la vie. Stratford’s restricted-view tickets are admirably cheap and for just £16 you can be transported to director Greg Doran’s world.
Here, thanks to ‘real-time performance capture’, an image of Ariel’s body seems to float in the air. This means that fairy Ariel (Mark Quartley, in asexual body suit and a school-of-Jedward hairdo) can be seen to one side, waving his limbs around, while on some screen or back-wall those movements are being translated into a raised, horizontal, fantastical picture-show.
By similar techno-wizardry, mariners flounder in the sea’s bubbles, insects swarm, the jungle blooms and, rather brilliantly, sharp-fanged hounds seem to rush at you from various angles. These duly scare the wits out of Caliban and his drunken mates.
THE danger with computer graphics is that the director neglects the human business of acting, but with Mr Russell Beale on hand that hazard is averted. This exiled Prospero, greybearded in dark robes like some Bardic Obi-Wan Kenobi, is the calm eye of the storm.
Around him, on the stage’s part-mirrored floor, we see digitised images of rings of flame and other pinks and yellows and purples and greens, at one point so kaleidoscopic it feels like something from Sgt Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band.
The play’s masque, when Juno and Ceres and Iris descend from Olympus, can often be a rather tiresome scene, but is here delicious to watch. One of the trio — I think Iris, though goddesses are much of a muchness — levitates in a vast-skirted dress on to which the most lovely floral images are shone.
The cast offers the naturally comedic Simon Trinder as jester Trinculo (much merriment when he fell into the audience at one point), Tony Jayawardena as his boozy accomplice Stephano and Joe Dixon as a winningly pitiable Caliban. Poor Caliban has a case of spinal warp to challenge any osteopath. Where the production droops a little is in its young lovers. Daniel Easton’s Ferdinand is a clean-cut lad but hardly memorable. You can imagine him going out in week four of The X Factor and never being heard of again. Jenny Rainsford’s Miranda seems five years too old and lacking in swoonsome tenderness. The show could do with an injection of sexiness. But what an astonishing stage spectacle it is, and what a relief, after over-reliance on stoical pit pony Sir Antony Sher in recent productions, to have the marvellous Mr Russell Beale back at the RSC.