Some of the most memorable incarnations of Shakespeare’s ‘Tempest’ are the most magical ones: Patrick Stewart’s Arctic Prospero commanded chilling shamanic powers, while Antony Sher’s spectacular South African mage had a giant puppet serpent to do his bidding.
Cheek by Jowl’s superb new production has no such tricks up its sleeve: this ‘Tempest’, in which an astonishing company of Russian actors is tossed about from terror to enlightenment on a bare stage, strips back the magic to reveal the bare power.
Igor Yaslovich’s Prospero rules his island and his daughter Miranda (a semi-feral girl) with the embittered wisdom of an old-school docklands gangmaster. When the enemies who cast him out of his previous kingdom fall into his power, his forgiveness of them is wrung, symbolically, from the Russian struggle to reconcile Soviet-era collectivism with murder, or nouveau consumerism with hope.
The masque at which Prospero betrothes Miranda to the son of his enemy here is a traditional sickle dance, whose performers are grotesquely resplendent in painted wooden heads. And the drunken servants who try to seize Prospero’s very real authority are diverted by a rack of irresistible designer suits and a credit card machine.
The physical language of the ensemble and the harsh, lovely rhythms of the Russian speech make an island of strange sounds. Water, poured from buckets by an uncanny collective Ariel (played by five men in identical suits) flows everywhere. It tortures sinners with a drip drip drip, bathes the fierce childish Miranda, and sloshes over her new lover, Ferdinand, like a baptism to cleanse his father’s sins.
Prospero’s slave Caliban (Alexander Feklistov) is extraordinary: an ox-necked, bare-chested, shaven-headed old bruiser who howls like a dog when Miranda, also keening in sorrow, is dragged away from him by her new husband. In the light of their mostrous innocence, the brave new world she’s sailing to has rarely seemed so old, corrupt and cowardly.