Comedy. Definitely a comedy. Academics have long agonised about how to categorise The Tempest but director Sean Holmes’s gleefully eccentric production is unequivocally comic. The great magician Prospero wears exceedingly tight bright yellow swimming trucks – and nothing else – for much of the show. Blow-up lilos feature heavily. Cheeky ad-libs and contemporary song choices, including a particularly raucous rendition of Three Lions, tear strips through Shakespeare’s text. It’s a rag-tag concoction but, in its best moments, it’s a riot.
With palm trees wrapped around the pillars, a shiny barbecue and hotel-lobby orchestra perched on the balcony, Paul Wills’s design looks like Love Island crossed with a B&Q summer sale. There are nods to the dark TV satire White Lotus, both in Cassie Kinoshi’s spikily playful score, as well as the decision to dress island “monster” Caliban (often portrayed as a grunting savage) as a brutally overworked local staff member. It’s an interesting read, which lends Ciarán O’Brien’s Caliban surprising dignity and depth, but it’s only the beginnings of an idea that rarely works its way into the rest of the show.
George Fouracres and Ralph Davis have a ball as the drunken Stefano and Trinculo – comedy bit-roles that here feel like star turns. Their island experience plays out like a stag do of epic proportions and they spend much of their time, when they’re not throwing wild punches or working the crowd into a frenzy, being grandly wheeled about the stage in a bright yellow plastic crate.
Those crates feature strongly. So too do a slew of yellow rubber ducks, a litany of lilos, and an endless catwalk of novelty costumes (hello Harry Potter!). The energy stays consistently high but what’s missing is the magic – and the power and grace that the suggestion of sorcery lends to Shakespeare’s language. Prospero’s book of spells is bound together with a Tesco bag and Prospero himself only feels commanding in the play’s dying moments. It’s a shame because there’s a rough-hewn playfulness about Ferdy Roberts that might have made for an unsettling Prospero, with a frightening kind of magic at his fingertips.
Shakespeare’s Globe, until 22 October.
