Superstar director Jamie Lloyd has had an incredible run of somewhat improbable celebrity-led West End smashes, from Martin Freeman in Richard III to Nicole Scherzinger in Sunset Boulevard.
This gargantuan production of Shakespeare’s The Tempest – the first non musical to play at Theatre Royal Drury Lane for decades – does feel like the point where his luck runs out. By which I mean: bagging the UK stage debut of movie icon Sigourney Weaver feels like a coup on paper, but maybe not so much in practice. She’s not embarrassingly bad or anything, but the role of exiled magician Prospero simply feels beyond her – this is a giant theatre, a tricky role, and she’s not done any Shakespeare since the ’80s. She’s not a good verse speaker, delivering everything in a concerned-mom monotone that fails to hold this big, weird play together. Having her on stage constantly – usually seated in a chair, observing the action – feels like a sop to her celebrity that isn’t borne out by her ability.
Setting its star aside, Lloyd’s Tempest is an awesome spectacle, in which the island to which Prospero has been exiled is represented by a hulking black hill, part industrial slag heap, part Denis Villeneuve's Dune. The entire production would seem to be set over a single night, and Jon Clark’s astonishing lighting makes the best of that: when magic occurs it looks incredible, glowing weird and bright, like the aliens arriving in Close Encounters. MVP of the whole thing is Mason Alexander Park’s bound spirit Aerial – a growlingly androgynous figure.Aerial is pledged to Prospero’s service, but beyond that his powers are clearly almost infinite – this is the rare Aerial where you feel how dangerous he is. Park often descends from the ceiling on visible safety ropes, in what perhaps feels like a nod to an older age of theatre in which Shakespeare was last seen at this theatre. But it still looks cool – Park has the air of somebody who could style out pretty much anything.
Elsewhere, newcomer Mara Huf is terrific as a growling voiced, sarcastic Miranda, turning many of Prospero’s daughter’s ditsiest lines on their heads – ‘oh brave new world, that has such people in’t’ definitely sounds like a pisstake.
In a play that has had a fair bit pruned to get it to a spare two hours 15 minute runtime, it feels like Lloyd has lavished a lot of time on the comedy subplot. The hijinks relating to the monstrous Caliban (depicted as a sort of grotesque overgrown baby by Forbes Masson) and the shipwrecked piss artists Stefano (Jasoin Barnett) and Trinculo (Matthew Horne) feel both overly prominent and generic. A lot has been written and argued about Caliban as a sort of post-colonial figure, but here he’s just a kinky doofus.
By contrast, the scenes following the other shipwreckees – notably bad guys Antonio, Alonso and Sebastian – feel lacking in flesh on their bones. They’re skimmed over and largely feel like a minor distraction – certainly there’s no sense of danger from them.
All-in-all it’s a stylish mix of good ideas and bad ideas. It looks awesome, and cues up Park and Huf as stars of the future. But it’s not very coherent and Weaver is not up to the role she’s been saddled with. There’s magic here, but it all gets pretty rough at times.
