If there were prizes for inventive recycling of props, this RSC staging would get the soup-tin statuette. Oil drums are rolled to illustrate anecdotes, drunkards quaff from petrol cans and Ariel’s flute is twisted together from plumbing pipes.
Such post-industrial stuff scatters Prospero’s island due to a climate event; the clothes are 21st century but the shipwrecked King of Naples and his entourage use sailing boats because wind is the only fuel left. With references to “the quality of the climate” and “mutinous winds”, The Tempest sustains director Elizabeth Freestone’s contemporary interpretation with little strain, helped by the opening storm being made by man.
Or, in this version, woman. Alex Kingston’s Prospero, though still an exiled “duke” of Milan, is mother to a daughter. This affects the text, neutralising Shakespeare’s “farther” puns and forcing recounts in Miranda’s lines about how many men she saw before Sebastian, while Prospero’s rather creepy concern with the security of Miranda’s hymen feels unlikely from a bohemian modern mother.
Gender-stubbornness about Shakespearean roles would have robbed us of great Lears from Glenda Jackson and Kathryn Hunter, and also of Kingston’s magnificent, revelatory Prospero. “Our revels now are ended” and “this rough magic I here abjure”, the soliloquies disavowing super-powers, are often played as elegiac farewells, but from Kingston feel closer to Christ at Gethsemane, a war between two natures. This Prospero rages against the dying of her might. Heledd Gwynn’s Ariel, hair and makeup channelling Aladdin Sane, is alternately punchy, touching and tuneful until a spectacularly athletic exit.
The Tempest is structurally messy. Some of Shakespeare’s most sublime verse – not just for Prospero, but also Caliban’s “the isle is full of noises”, tinglingly delivered by Tommy Sim’aan – brackets lumbering drunken comedy and discussions of Milanese and Tunisian successions. Prospero, Ariel and Caliban are largely absent from these subplots and, with such a powerful trio in those roles, the play’s unevenness is even more severe. Freestone addresses this by giving Kingston or Gwynn extra lines or business and focusing, even in the farcical sequences, on power relationships. Tom Piper’s set vividly flips from ecological junkyard dystopia to a verdant, chirpy “brave new world” possible, it is suggested, if humanity and habitat can reconcile.
A very modern staging that is fundamentally true to the text and the RSC’s intellectual, rigorous, clear-speaking traditions.
At the Royal Shakespeare theatre, Stratford-upon-Avon, until 4 March
