Review of the Week: The Tempest at the RSC

The Tempest is at the Royal Shakespeare Theatre, Stratford-upon-Avon, until 20 June

How old is Prospero? He is the wizard who breaks his wand, the despot who gives up his power, the father who releases his beloved daughter into her own future. According to theatre lore, he is no less than the personification of the end of Shakepeare’s solo playwriting career. But he remains potent enough to have complete control over the circumstances and timing of his abdication. He is not going to die, like so many Shakespearean rulers, but be restored to his former glory back home.

This is the paradox that a ruggedly vigorous Kenneth Branagh explores from his first appearance, as the crazed conductor of an operatic tempest that has the shipwrecked mariners staggering, poop to prow, on a stage which physically bucks and rolls beneath their sliding feet.

The show marks Branagh’s return to the RSC four decades after his name-making debut with the company as Henry V, when he was instantly hailed as the heir to Laurence Olivier. He is partnering the role with that of Lopakhin, the pragmatist arguing for ruthless modernisation in Chekhov’s The Cherry Orchard. The director is Richard Eyre, for many years an inspired leader of the National Theatre, who is astonishingly only now making his RSC directing debut at the age of 83.

Will this be a piece of well-spoken heritage theatre by two of the grand old men of the British stage? Though undeniably well-spoken, with a supporting cast stuffed with stalwarts of the classical theatre, it certainly will not, as the shipwreck scene so vividly portends. It is an overwhelming piece of theatrical conjury, in which lightning flashes from a tumultuous multimedia projection, to a roiling drum beat, in perfect time with the jabs of the maestro’s baton.

This Prospero does not behave like a burned-out old man so much as the mid-career governor of a remote colony, in love with his dominion and determined to leave on his own terms, even as he realises that his time is up. When Ruby Stokes’s interestingly self-composed Miranda frets about the loss of life in the shipwreck, he first mansplains her own unworldliness to her, then impatiently puts her to sleep on a creepy levitating platform under the shroud of her own cape. 

He ruthlessly orchestrates his daughter’s relationship with Fred Woodley Evans’s courteous Ferdinand, whom he paralyses, quivering, in mid-stride and then drops into an undignified tangle of limbs. He is keen for the couple to get together, but his discovery of them on the point of consummating their relationship without his go-ahead throws him into an almighty tantrum.

He is clearly enchanted by Amara Okereke’s aerialist Ariel, who hovers unseen above the action, turning graceful somersaults and bursting into operatic arias when she isn’t gleefully freeze-framing or ventriloquising scenes below (the stage illusions, by Chris Fisher, are precise and stunning). 

If Ariel is Prospero’s artistic muse, she is also his portal to a world with its own magic and dignity, into which the shipwrecked Neapolitans stumble through a tear in a Rousseau-esque painted forest-scape – one of many lovely allusive touches in a seamless collaboration between Bob Crowley (set), Akhila Krishnan (video) and Hugh Vanstone (lighting).

For all its magic, Eyre underpins the production with the rigorous political intelligence that was so central to his National Theatre work. Crucially, Ashley Zhangazha’s Caliban is no fawning monster but a fresh-faced innocent, who dramatically spits out the liquor he is offered by the drunken pretenders Trinculo and Stephano, and sweetly offers to show them the riches of his island in a naive faith that they will share it all with him.

If this reading sacrifices some of the triangular hilarity of the comedy scenes, it makes sense of Caliban’s command of some of Shakespeare’s loveliest poetry. He is a deconstruction of the philosopher Rousseau’s “noble savage”: a young Mandela figure who has emerged from imprisonment with an integrity and poise that are not dependent on the musty rags of colonialist tradition, whether Prospero’s magician’s cloak or the contents of Trinculo and Stephano’s sea-rotted dressing-up box.

Allusions to western pop culture, across film, literature and art, are offset by a score, from Akintayo Akinbode and Stephen Warbeck, that is rich in the rhythms of the global south, peaking in a betrothal scene in which Shakespearean masque is transformed into African masquerade, with feathered spirit-dancers doing the honours.

But for all the ecstatic evocation of a long-imprisoned culture finally able to dance to its own tune, Eyre is too shrewd a thinker to suggest that everything is resolved. When Prospero outlines his options – “I must be here confined by you / Or sent to Naples” – he speaks them not to the audience but to Caliban. He is painting himself out of the picture because he simply cannot imagine a different sort of coexistence, one of equals rather than servant and master. 

This leaves us, the spectators, with an uncomfortable question: what happens to a slave who is suddenly left in charge of a kingdom, or – in its more literal manifestation – to an aerialist when her strings are cut? What sort of new world is the white patriarch leaving, as he scuttles back to Naples to take back his place in the old one? It is a question for both artists and politicians, for today and for all times, posed by an actor and a director still at the top of their games. 

Dorian Lynskey is away