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Catherine Bennett highlights the trends in the performing arts world today.
Jonathan Cridford reviews 'Ghosts', one of the Freshers' plays for this year.
On paper, Trevor Nunn’s Tempest had all the potential to be the outstanding critical and commercial hit of this year’s West End season. Its utter artistic failure is, therefore, an incredible disappointment.
The show has made over £1million in pre-sales, stars, in Ralph Fiennes, one of the leading lights of a generation, and is directed by a man whose work includes seminal productions that shaped the way we consider staging Shakespeare. For those elements to produce three hours of such dull and leaden work that several rows of audience members had entirely cleared themselves by the start of the second half is almost unforgivable.
The creative team led by Nunn, and comprising Stephen Lewis (design), Paul Pyant (lighting), and Shaun Davey (music), must take a huge amount of the blame. The Tempest demands a powerful and enchanting atmosphere, with the isle ‘full of noises’ often proving more interesting than the narrative itself, but Lewis and Pyant combine to bathe the stage in the sort of dappled green light that wouldn’t look out of place in a school production of The Lion King. Davey’s music, such a key component of the mystery of the island, is naff, unengaging, and frequently irritating, and accompanies extended dance sequences from the spirits that provoked little reaction other than a lot of awkward shuffling in seats. As a director of The Tempest, nailing the magic and environment has to be a priority, and Nunn has got it very badly wrong.
Prospero’s power is vastly undermined by these failures – this is not a world at which we marvel, or one about which we care. Fiennes isn’t bad, he just isn’t particularly interesting, and is not helped by having magic powers reminiscent of The Worst Witch; his credibility as an omnipotent mage is totally destabilised by his supernatural disarming of Ferdinand, which basically amounts to tapping a sword lightly with a stick.
As a result, Fiennes is far more convincing as the broken, tired man of the finale than as the all-powerful sorcerer of the start, with his increasing isolation perfectly captured in his hunched shoulders, bowed head and short, dragging steps at the moment he releases Miranda to Ferdinand. The quiet simplicity of ‘she’s thine own’ as Prospero relinquishes the paternal and supernatural bonds placed on his daughter has a heart and depth desperately lacking elsewhere in the production.
As Ariel, Tom Byam Shaw is given a thankless task; his movement is beautiful, but nonsensical, while his voice, echoed and distorted by a microphone, just becomes irritating. Giles Terera, as Caliban, is rather better, and the classic slapstick scene of his discovery by Stephano and Trinculo is nicely managed with Nicholas Lyndhurst, but Terera’s sudden nobility in the show’s finale feels forced, an ugly attempt to shoehorn an easy ending. Much of the subtlety, texture and complexity of his relationships with Prospero and Stephano felt brushed aside, which was rather typical of the evening.
The Neapolitan lords epitomise the show’s problems; their scenes are utterly lacking in invention, variation, or subtlety, with long, static periods of nondescript dialogue. Chris Andrew Mellon is perfectly competent as Sebastian, but he’s the main offender in some very ‘Shakespeare-by-numbers’ acting – hearty laughs, pats on the back and groups of people sinking to their haunches for no reason pervade the lords’ interaction. This is particularly frustrating, because given the interest in the show, the popularity of Fiennes post-Harry Potter, and the huge amount of money taken, it’s reasonable to assume that a lot of the audience were watching Shakespeare live for the first time. Both the lords and the spirits, engaging in dull, repetitive, meaningless movement pieces, utterly fulfilled every negative preconception that audiences bring to Shakespeare – I would be surprised if the people who emptied out of our row during the interval ever came back to one of his plays again.
The production’s one moment of sheer brilliance, a slashing cut to monochrome from the technicolour Masque as Prospero remembers Caliban’s rebellion, only serves as a reminder of the powerful, human spectacle this show could have been. For a director capable of such excellence to produce a show which falls as low as this is, therefore, an immense disappointment.
The Tempest is on at Theatre Royal Haymarket, London, until 29th October.
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