Though his concept is not a total success, director and lead performer Tim Crouch unweaves Shakespeare’s valedictory play in the candlelit wooden space of the Wanamaker Playhouse and remakes it into a rich and strange inquiry into power. Prospero in The Tempest is often regarded as an avatar for the author: a magician who controls the narrative and manipulates emotion before revealing and renouncing his tricks at the end. He’s largely seen as a ‘good’ character but as Crouch has noted, we mostly have his word for that.
Here, Prospero’s scenes become a piece of ritualised storytelling between him, his daughter Miranda and the island inhabitants, Ariel and Caliban, who he has enslaved. They sit in a square on stools, holding glimmering sconces like votive accessories. Lines are reallocated, translated or voiced by two or more characters at once, shifting meaning, authority or emphasis. The other characters – nobles and servants confounded in a storm of Prospero’s making, so he can test their moral fibre – are summoned into the quartet’s orbit, supposedly from the audience or the ushering staff.
