Spectacular Tempest

The Tempest
Royal Shakespeare Company
The Observer

Ron Daniels's production of The Tempest (Stratford) begins with a a first-rate shipwreck. It is mechanically persuasive, and even allows us to tell the characters apart. They are all rushing about at the sharp end, which juts out at us. 

Then, with a lightning-flash, it is gone, to be replaced by Derek Jacobi’s Prospero, a conductor lowering his baton on a taxing finale. Behind him lies the wreck of another ship, presumably the one on which he came to the island. It looks more impressive than you might guess from the paranoid tale he tells his daughter (the way he talks, it was nothing but a coracle), but, as designed by Maria Bjornson, it makes a splendid unifying setting for the rest of the play. 

Like Peter Hall in his National production, Mr. Daniels pays rewarding attention to music and spectacle. He too has a master showman at the centre; Mr. Jacobi’s is a gripping performance on several levels. It takes him as an actor beyond the skilled charm that got him through Benedict and Peer Gynt; there are deeper tones in his voice, more iron in his soul. 

Technically commanding, he is psychologically very acute. His Prospero is a man moving from one loneliness to another. His magic powers give him a relationship with Ariel that inspires affection on both sides, but no contact; the desires to have freedom and to bestow to have freedom become ambiguous things. For the masque of Juno on the bleached boat sports a traverse curtain, much in evidence thereafter and making the analogy of Prospero as magician with Shakespeare as the towering playwright more potent than I have known it. 

He stops the show with a passion that encompasses vocational disillusion, and leads logically—i.e. bitterly—into ‘Our revels now are ended.’ Magic drains him, and it is a relief to give it up. A risk and a sacrifice as well: Mr. Jacobi gives careful emphasis to Propsero’s decision to choose ‘reason’ over ‘fury’ and foreswear revenge. ‘And they shall be themselves,’ he says of his enemies: for better, but probably for worse.  

Mark Rylance’s Ariel, as widely advertised, comes on with a quintet of lookalikes: actually a backing group, Ariel and his Full Fathom Five. They help out with music—the sea-dirge has been beautifully set by Stephen Oliver and is beautifully sung—and with the tricks. They are notably effective manipulating the yapping skeletal dogs that torment the clowns, less so when cluttering the place up striking attitudes. 

Bob Peck’s Caliban is disappointingly average, though vouchsafed a last ominous appearance. The love scenes are a bit giggly, though Alice Krige is coming on as Miranda. The couriers are livelier than usual, with the descent into madness of Alonso (Paul Webster) given something of its proper weight. They turn up for the final judging one lord short. Did he ever get off the island?