In June, Daniel Evans and Tamara Harvey will take over as artistic directors at the RSC. Let’s hope they give it a shaking. When I started reviewing for the Observer 25 years ago, the RSC was the default provider of Shakespeare productions. Since then the Globe has captured hearts, often with bolder approaches to the plays, as have stagings at the Almeida, Sheffield, the National, the Donmar and Bath’s Ustinov. Productions at Stratford are seldom less than proficient, but I can’t remember when I last left with my heart beating faster at an interpretation.
Meanwhile too much of the surrounding experience – which primes the audience for what they see on stage – is discouraging. Public transport to Stratford-upon-Avon is always a struggle for anyone who doesn’t live nearby, and it’s particularly ironic that it helps to have a car to get to The Tempest. The climate crisis is one in a blizzard of ideas that threaten to overwhelm Elizabeth Freestone’s production. Tom Piper’s bold, tumbled design with repurposed plastic, verdigris drawbridges and a glowing forest makes its own climate case. Still, I am not convinced that weather disruption propels the play as thoroughly as it does A Midsummer Night’s Dream. A jargon-heavy programme essay (“Prospero geo-engineers a storm experience”) left me more sceptical.
The casting of Alex Kingston as Prospero more interestingly switches the emphasis of the plot, towards layers of affection and subjection. This is not a feminist first – Vanessa Redgrave took the role at the Globe more than 20 years ago – but it has a far-reaching effect. Kingston, who draws the audience to her with fervour, is a no-nonsense maternal figure, pulsing with warmth: it is the only time I have seen Prospero torn with sorrow when Ariel flies off. What is more, the most moral of the courtiers is also played by a woman. All fine, this, save that it results in a sentimental goody-baddy split on gender lines. Is a female Caliban impossible? She could still have had a violent go at Miranda.
There are striking performances from Jamie Ballard (Antonio), crumbling into himself with bad intent, and from Heledd Gwynn’s liquid Ariel – though can you really fly away from servitude while hoisted on a visible chain? Yet this is a production that exposes The Tempest as, for all its haunting lines, one of the least compelling of Shakespeare’s plays; the opening few minutes of rapid plot summary are enough to make you wonder if he knew how to do drama. Perhaps the new artistic directors could cut the gabbled backstory from the performance and include it instead in what will, I hope, be reconsidered, redesigned programmes.
The RSC needs to prove it is essential, not least because it receives Arts Council funding. Unlike Hampstead theatre, which, stripped of its grant last year, has just put on the most exhilarating play I’ve seen there for ages. Ruby Thomas has based Linck & Mülhahn on the revelatory real-life story of a married couple brought to trial in Saxony in 1721, basically for having sex with each other. Linck, a former musketeer, had been born a girl. Mülhahn’s mother discovered this and denounced the couple for sodomy. Linck was executed; Mülhahn, whose defence claimed she discovered her lover’s birth sex only a year into the marriage, was imprisoned for three years.
The contemporary resonance is startling; by pointing this out in dogged, explicatory speeches, Thomas muffles the impact. Take these speeches away and the evening sparkles and disrupts under Owen Horsley’s direction. The dialogue is laced with Austen-style acerbities: “I do not lurk,” complains the mother: “I linger.” The trial scene is as cartoonishly funny as it is disturbing. Maggie Bain (in military breeches) and Helena Wilson (in a shift) make the love story robust as well as tender. The 21st century erupts into the 18th with clashing idioms and music in which harpsichord ripples are outnumbered by explosions of rock – as if the couple were living ahead of themselves. Matt Daw’s lighting saps the colour from the condemned pair so that they end up white as bone. Simon Wells’s handsome design of semitranslucent screens spins round, as if to say: here we are, back in the same place, centuries on. No wonder Peter Tatchell was on his feet at the end, crying out: “Superb!”
If anything, The Lehman Trilogy has become weightier, more threatening since it was first staged in 2018. The original wonder of Sam Mendes’s production of Stefano Massini’s play, adapted by Ben Power, was the incisive economy with which the history of American capitalism was charted through the fortunes of one Jewish family. That holds true in this revival.
Es Devlin’s transparent box design – “the magical musical box called America” – revolves as the action moves from 1844 to 2008, while, as if accompanying a silent movie, Yshani Perinpanayagam echoes the Lehman voyage from Bavaria to Alabama to New York in piano music, beginning and ending with a Yiddish lullaby. Luke Halls’s video captures the larger landscapes as the family business changes from fabric selling to investment bank: plantations, burning fields, acres laid waste by civil war, the New York skyline. On stage throughout are the familiar cardboard boxes carried by employees when Lehman collapsed.
Crucially, three actors – barely adapting Katrina Lindsay’s sober costumes – become a myriad characters, multigenerational, epoch-leaping, gender-defying. Michael Balogun, Hadley Fraser and Nigel Lindsay morph as ingeniously as the first cast. They are the three Bavarian brothers and they are their American descendants. With a bend of waist and wrist, a simper or a glare (this is a man-oriented show) they become their wives; with a whimper or treble voice they turn into their children; a dying man transforms into the doctor who tends him.
I still wish the play delivered a clear explanation of Lehmans’ final implosion. What is powerfully suggested is a gradual hollowing out of values as the business changes from dealing in goods to dealing in money: from stuff to symbol. Where better than a theatre to show how an illusion can captivate, and faith be instilled by confident presentation: “Trust me, I’m an actor.”
Star ratings (out of five)
The Tempest ★★★
Linck and Mülhahn ★★★
The Lehman Trilogy ★★★★
