19 January 2025
Dame Judi Dench in her brilliant acting memoir, Shakespeare: The Man Who Pays the Rent (a highly commended runner up in the 2024 Theatre Book Prize, judged by myself and Clive Davis of The Times), says:
“What’s important is that you avoid sending up a flare that announces: Big Speech Coming Up.
That’s fatal, as the audience will switch off in advance.
The thing to do is to catch them out. And you do that by telling the story and playing the argument,
discovering each thought line by line, as if it’s occurring to you in the moment.”
Great advice on making Shakespeare live for a modern audience from one of our greatest actors and orators.
Hollywood star Sigourney Weaver cannot deliver Shakespeare. In the daunting role of Prospero in Jamie Lloyd’s minimalist version of The Tempest that brings Shakespeare back to the Theatre Royal Drury Lane for the first time since Sir John Gielgud trod the boards there as Prospero in 1957, her delivery is monotone and flat. It all lands with a terrible thud – she might as well have been reading the London phone directory. There is nothing magical, mystical or magisterial about this Prospero. And it proves fatal in a production that has been sold solely on her star stunt casting.
It’s Weaver’s London stage debut and she has been badly advised and let down by her director, who produced theatrical gold with a revelatory minimalist A Doll’s House on Broadway starring Jessica Chastain – my personal hit of that 2023 season – and again with Nicole Scherzinger as the immortal Norma Desmond in Andrew Lloyd Webber’s legendary Sunset Boulevard. Why didn’t he put her in a modern American classic such as Who’s Afraid of Virgina Wolf? Weaver is a fine screen actor (BAFTA, Grammy, and Gold Globe Award-winning in the likes of Alien and Avatar) but making her UK stage debut in Shakespeare will not be bothering the Oliviers or Critics Circle Awards.
Watching her deliver her role largely seated at the front of the stage, my mind wandered as to how the production would have been transformed by Dame Judi (almost blind) playing Prospero. It would have been electric.
The script has been cut to only 2 hours but despite the fact this Prospero has no magic staff they still bizarrely have the lines
I’ll break my staff,
Bury it certain fathoms in the earth,
And, deeper than did ever plummet sound,
I’ll drown my book.
Like much else in this production, that just doesn’t make sense.
The vast playing area to the very edges of the enormous Drury Lane stage is a dark and gloomy moonscape that looks like a gravel-pit or a Doctor Who set from the 1970s. The tempest, which rages away at the start of the production as Weaver sits and stares at us, is mesmerising; conveyed by sound and fury and haze with a swirling silk sheet flowing the full width of the stage. Simplistic and minimal, it is an amazing visual moment. It’s sadly downhill from that moment.
As for the rest of the cast, most of who act as if they are in a completely different production, Mason Alexander Park’s unsettling and beguiling Ariel who periodically breaks into gorgeous song, makes the strongest impression. Descending menacingly from above the stage on ropes or stalking the black dunes wrapped in billowing silks, they growl, roar, and hiss their lines with an electrifying feral intensity. Forbes Masson is equally chilling and sinister as the monster Caliban, while Jason Barnett as Stephano and Matthew Horne as Trinculo, the Jester work brilliantly as a double act delivering laugh-out-loud moments in the very short act 2.
But with Prospero making no impression at all at its centre , this high-end production is a missed opportunity. No Rough Magic to see here.
Hopes remain high for Lloyd’;s Much Ado About Nothing next month with Tom Hiddleston and Hayley Atwell.
