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It should have been magic but it fails to spark. Sigourney Weaver, an austerely commanding Hollywood star of the old school and a Broadway veteran, makes her West End debut for Jamie Lloyd, the visionary director who coaxed Nicole Scherzinger into Sunset Blvd and Emilia Clark into Chekhov.
She’s playing Prospero at Drury Lane for 64 performances only, 67 years after John Gielgud played the part here and prophesied that after him this great theatre would be “lost to musicals” and never again host Shakespeare. That Weaver’s Tempest is now taking place in a gap between the Disney blockbusters Frozen and Hercules should make it all the more special. But instead of lightning in a bottle, it’s a damp squib.
It’s still extraordinary that London theatre in 2024 began with Sarah Jessica Parker in Plaza Suite and ends with Weaver, and that Sarah Snook, Lily Collins and Tom Holland graced our stages in between.
Glamour and sensation are vital parts of theatre’s ecology. There’s an undeniable thrill to the first sight of Weaver, tall and severe and spotlit, black silk ballooning and voiding behind her like a ship’s buffeted sail. She remains on stage throughout this pared-down version, often surveying the action from an upstage stool like a beady puppetmistress.
Lloyd’s production has an incantatory, dream-like quality. The cast wear headset mics and speak the verse with great clarity but little passion, their movements stylised and stiff: on the first of two press nights, Weaver lost her words a couple of times.
An interesting thematic suggestion that Prospero’s island is a place of rebirth gets lost amid the sonorous intonation and tedious comic relief. For all its stark visual boldness, this is a curiously old-fashioned take.
Designer Soutra Gilmour dresses the cast in shades of blue and grey and a collage of styles, with a weird fondness for fingerless gloves. She fills the loftily exposed stage with more gorgeous silks that suggest shimmering water or pregnant clouds above black, volcanic dunes. It made me think of… well, Dune, not least because Mara Huf as Prospero’s daughter Miranda is a Zendaya lookalike in a silvery hoodie.
Huf and James Phoon’s jockish Ferdinand bring a little warmth to the proceedings with their impetuous romance: a late lighting change catches them in a sex act.
Mason Alexander Park also impresses as a hoarse and frightening Ariel, descending from the ceiling like an armoured angel of vengeance. Selina Cadell – who has been friends with Weaver since 1974 and got her to do a cameo in Doc Martin – is quietly affecting as the kindly courtier Gonzalo.
But Forbes Masson’s Caliban is shrieky and over-the-top, the clowns (Jason Barnett and Mathew Horne) woefully unfunny. Lloyd’s deployment of star actors and dramatic, tech-augmented visuals usually imbues the plays and musicals he reworks with an urgent lucidity. This show, short as it is, meanders and drags.
Sorry to end the year on a ‘meh’ review. I write it with regret as an unashamed fan of both Weaver and Lloyd’s work. In the future I’ll be glad to say that I saw their Tempest. I just wish I could say it was better.
Theatre Royal Drury Lane, to February 1; book tickets here
