The Stage

The Tempest

Published Thursday 19 February 2009 at 12:10 by Richard Edmonds

Recently, there was an RSC Tempest set in the Antarctic with a terrifying Ariel recalling filmic images of Nosferatu. But Janice Honeyman’s electrifying vision of the play returns Shakespeare’s darkly lyrical text to the tropics, distilling Prospero’s profound magic into an evening which bursts with excitement and visual brilliance.

And no previous productions prepare you for Honeyman’s radical approach to the text. Prospero’s island lies somewhere off the African coast and is peopled by masked creatures who practise ju-ju and witchcraft, thus some of the spoken verse has become translated for the occasion into Swahili, Xhosa, Zulu, Tswana and Sotho and in this context it works.

Huge African masks (sets and costumes are stunning) are carried in by puppeteers and are then used to terrify Shakespeare’s well-known miscreants and if that isn’t enough to set your hair on end, you have a disturbing music score, drawn from African tribal traditions, which runs throughout the evening from an on-stage band who sit beneath huge over-hanging trees and become in turn impassive shadowy spectators.

I found the opening shipwreck and the great masque blurred and unconvincing, but I much enjoyed the antics of an Afrikaaner-accented Trinculo and Stephano, perhaps the best comedy duo I’ve yet seen and Miranda and Ferdinand have their moments, along with John Kani’s restrained Caliban.

Ariel (Atandwa Kani) is seen here as an athletic tribal warrior, whose moving scenes with Antony Sher’s Prospero occasionally become impassive testaments to defiance. Kani is truly a thing fashioned from air and his final leave-taking is both eager and unemotional.

Sher himself is wonderfully restrained, keeping his old theatrical magic for Prospero’s set pieces when he shows once again how marvellously he can hold an audience in the palm of his hand, a great actor centred in a production which rattles around inside your head long after it finishes and is a celebration of a joyous African rationale.