The Tempest on at the Sam Wanamaker Playhouse. Photo: Marc Brenner.
The Tempest, thought to be Shakespeare’s last solo play, is Dominic Dromgoole’s farewell production after 10 successful years as Artistic Director of The Globe. This final play of Shakespeare’s four late tragicomic romances staged at the Jacobean-style Sam Wanamaker Playhouse conjures up a sense of candle-lit wonder. As usual with Dromgoole, humour is accentuated but this time it does not undermine the work’s more serious themes of betrayal, power, loss and reconciliation.
The opening sea-storm sequence is nicely done in an old-fashioned mode, using a model of a ship, the sound of a thunder sheet and swinging chandeliers, while those on board lurch from one side of the stage to the other into the front rows of the audience. Off-stage voices in the corridor are used to create a sense of bewitchment, while the banquet mirage and wedding masque are staged-managed with other-worldly charm by the airy sprite Ariel and her assistants.
This sense of strangeness is offset by the earthy Caliban-led rebellion involving raucous, knockabout farce from drunken butler Stephano and jester Trinculo bursting through the auditorium – a comic parallel to the courtly plotting that has a much darker edge.
Jonathan Fensom’s design, meanwhile, features a rocky outcrop, wildly growing greenery and Prospero’s ‘cell’ adorned with pages from his books of magic. Stephen Warbeck’s marvellous, eerie score makes a major contribution to the atmosphere of an ‘isle full of noises, Sounds, and sweet airs’, with the music integral to the action.
Tim McMullan seizes with both hands his overdue chance to play a major classical role. His thickly bearded, bass-baritone Prospero is a magisterial figure burning with real anger, undergoing tempestuous emotions as he eventually eschews vengeance for forgiveness of his enemies. Pippa Nixon’s silvery Ariel is a lithe aerialist descending from the flies who yearns for liberty but whose compassion for the shipwrecked influences her master, whilst Fisayo Akinade’s mud-smeared Caliban, emerging from beneath the stage, is an unusually sensitive creature with a keen sense of injustice and little menace. As for the human characters, Phoebe Pryce is a touchingly naïve and ardent Miranda falling for Dharmesh Patel’s rather insipid Ferdinand, and Trevor Fox’s slurred Stephano with ideas above his station and Dominic Rowan’s droll Trinculo ad libbing at will make a good double act of anarchic fun.
The performance ends with a ritualised ‘light dance’ after which the candles are blown out as if the previous two and a half hours had been a vision of spirits. The show proves an admirable swansong to Dromgoole’s reign.
The Tempest is on until 22nd April 2016. Click here for tickets.
