The Stage

The Tempest

Published Thursday 1 April 2010 at 11:05 by Jeremy Brien

Many and varied themes are available to be explored in Shakespeare’s majestic tone poem of a final play.

Ian Barritt (Prospero) and Ffion Jolly (Miranda) in The Tempest at the Tobacco Factory Photo: Graham Burke

Andrew Hilton, artistic director of the popular Shakespeare at the Tobacco Factory, has chosen to see it as a parable of good and evil, while never losing sight of the hypnotic power of the magical verse.

This view is, of course, available in the text, but Hilton underscores it with a single bold stroke - casting the same actor, the versatile Christopher Staines, as both Ariel and Caliban. It is a highly effective manoeuvre, and helps to give the lie to the argument that, for all the praise heaped on the company and their box office success, SATTF had become a touch complacent in sticking so rigidly to its chamber approach.

The motif is particularly poignant in the final scene where Ian Barritt’s formidable Prospero suddenly rediscovers his human side and allows the physically twisted Caliban to morph into the upstanding Ariel. It is present also when Jonathan Nibbs’ shipwrecked and fragile King of Naples is protected from the murderous intentions of Peter Clifford’s calculating Antonio and Alan Coveney’s ambitious Sebastian, and in the comic scenes between Caliban and the drunken servant duo of Stephano (Chris Donnelly) and Trinculo (Felix Hayes), given a sharper edge by the conspiracy to kill Prospero.

Only Ffion Jolly’s elfin-like Miranda and Benjamin Askew’s lovestruck Ferdinand seem to be inhabiting a totally innocent world - that of first love.