Sigourney Weaver, the latest in the line of high status screen stars to be wooed to the stage by director Jamie Lloyd, may for ever be known as Ellen Ripley to fans of her defining science fiction role on film. She is certainly in alien territory here, and plays Prospero with the steely-voiced conviction of a commander giving urgent instruction to an interstellar space crew at imminent risk of attack. She is making her West End debut in this late Shakespearean drama as its gender-reversed central sorcerer and usurped Duchess of Milan, and the remote isle of sounds and sweet airs which she sequesters appears to be floating in deep space.
The dark hills and rubble on Soutra Gilmour’s set look lunar, the booms and bursts in the black background sound like explosions of interplanetary matter (the sound design and compositions are by Ben and Max Ringham) and the lights (designed by Jon Clark) look like the blazing beams of UFOs.
Weaver is not a masterful Prospero: her verse delivery is flat and featureless, which leaves a vacuum in this key role. But nuanced verse is spoken by Selina Cadell, who plays Prospero’s trusty councillor Gonzalo, and Jude Akuwudike as the King of Naples. Both show Weaver’s woodenness up by contrast. But the pay-off for Weaver’s (stunt?) casting is that her science-fiction back catalogue inspires the bigger concept of Lloyd’s production, with dazzling results.
You might call it a space opera, for all its music and song. Or sci-fi Shakespeare, for its mix of poetry and next-level theatrical showmanship. The swirling black emptiness around the set looks fathomless, blasts of light bring tremendous visual drama, and sheer silken sheets spanning the length of the stage are used in simple but sensational ways. The production creates its own dark magic with large-scale grandeur.
The cast often stand in what seems like self-conscious “Beam me up, Scotty” lineups, and wear costumes combining 1970s space designs with 1990s high school musicals. The central love story with Prospero’s daughter Miranda (Mara Huf) and Ferdinand (James Phoon) seems like a high school musical romance too – light relief against all the brooding.
Its detractors may call it an intergalactic failure, or make comparisons with Kenneth Branagh’s feverish King Lear from last year, which also had a planetary backdrop. This is not feverish in the least but it is outre, employing camp as a serious aesthetic choice. Caliban (Forbes Masson), for instance, is dressed in a gimpy black corset and pants, and looks like a cross between Big Daddy and Divine, but plays his role for pathos rather than laughs. Then there is the high-wire Ariel (Mason Alexander Park, the star of the show) an alarming, alluring spirit who descends from the rafters on a harness looking gender-indeterminate and speaking through a voice distortion machine.
Music is key in the production, which feels apt on an island that magically hums with “a thousand twangling instruments”. The play’s snatched songs are put to music, and Alexander Park brings the most lustrous vocals.
Lloyd does not eke out any deeper meanings from the text, but does present Prospero’s magical world with a stylised quality that carries touches of Peter Brook’s performance theatre and the avant-gardism of Lindsay Kemp. Characters move in gestural ways, at a stately pace, retreating to the back of the set to stand in heroic silhouette when they are not part of the action. Trinculo (Mathew Horne) and Stephano (Jason Barnett), who feature in the subplot of comical insurgency, behave like avant garde clowns too. Some of the ritualistic circling is overdone at the end, but still it has the feel of Greek theatre in outer space.
It’s all thoroughly odd, but in an audacious and enlivening way. So, come for Sigourney Weaver and stay for the weird magic.
