Sigourney Weaver stars in a bleakly spectacular The Tempest ...

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We first see Sigourney Weaver’s Prospero sitting, meditatively, in a shaft of white light while behind her the vast stage of the Drury Lane Theatre submits to a raging storm of her own conjuring, all billowing blue silk, thunderous depths and blasts of lighting. 

It’s a dazzling opening to Jamie Lloyd’s staging of The Tempest, one that heralds this production’s striking use of the scope of the stage. Mason Alexander Park’s Ariel descends from the great heights of the flies, Forbes Masson’s Caliban crawls out from beneath the stage; the courtiers, whom Prospero has shipwrecked and now holds in her power, creep, befuddled, from the crepuscular recesses. No video cameras in this staging: Lloyd and lighting designer Jon Clark sculpt the space, sending the characters hurtling across the stage in a glowing burst or silhouetting them stock-still on the set’s dark hills.

And the production, though sadly undermined by its flaws, is bleakly spectacular (designed by Soutra Gilmour). Here the island over which Prospero (Weaver making her West End debut) holds sway is, by turns, a barren Dune-like landscape strewn with black rubble, a mysterious, otherworldly oasis and an empty stage, depending on the tricks of lighting and the mind’s eye. The period is indeterminate, the costumes belonging to some future that draws on medieval touches, cast in the soft blues, slate greys and aquamarines of the ocean, with variations depending on age and status. It’s a strange limbo-like space, one that fuses the real and the fantastical, one where events could even be in Prospero’s imagination. 

The approach honours the fascination in Shakespeare’s play with power — political, creative, magical, divine — and with theatre itself, embracing Drury Lane’s rich history. It speaks too to the island’s role as template: an arena where human beings try out authority — from Prospero’s enslavement of the spirits, to the conspirators planning a murderous coup, to Caliban’s hero-worship of the drunken servant Stephano. That they are tussling for supremacy in a desolate wilderness has bitter contemporary resonance.

But what makes The Tempest such a great play is its emotional depth and wisdom: the great beauty of its exploration of forgiveness, redemption and rebirth. Prospero is such a strange, ambivalent character and there can be immense poignancy and moral complexity to his (or her) retreat from revenge. That human intricacy and intimacy often elude this staging. There’s a lack of jeopardy and it’s curiously unmoving, even at the highly charged reconciliation between Ferdinand (James Phoon) and his father Alonso (Jude Akuwudike), both of whom believe the other to be dead. The comic scenes, always tricky, feel particularly laboured.  

Weaver’s Prospero, a mournful, stately presence, is constantly onstage observing her handiwork unfold: a parent hovering in the background; a woman watching the men who have wronged her as they play into her hands. But she is largely static and her delivery is perplexingly one-note: she seems implacable, almost emotionally detached. That may be the reading — Prospero as the still eye of the storm — but it means that some of the play’s great poetry doesn’t sing out and it flattens any sense of battle or reflection within the character over the path she has chosen. 

There’s fabulous work from Park as Ariel, an eerie, ethereal being with a superb singing voice, whose resentment at being enslaved burns across the stage. Selina Cadell brings warmth and humanity to the good courtier Gonzalo. And there’s a drive to revisit the play’s strangeness and teaching for our times. But overall, it feels like something gets lost at sea.

★★★☆☆  

To February 1, thejamielloydcompany.com