The Tempest

Theatre Royal Drury Lane, London

Great excitement this week as Hollywood veteran Sigourney Weaver teleported into London to make her long-overdue West End debut.

And what could be more a more fitting challenge for her than a sci-fi version of Shakespeare’s late play, The Tempest?

The versatile American actress is known for many hugely different films – from Working Girl to Gorillas In The Mist and The Ice Storm. But none live longer or more alarmingly in the memory than her part in Ridley Scott’s Alien franchise.

In The Tempest she takes on the role of Prospero, conventionally played by a man but which works perfectly with Weaver as a former female ‘Duke’ of Milan who has been deposed and shipwrecked on a desert island. Only here, in Jamie Lloyd’s latest celebrity reboot, it’s as if that desert island is a distant planet which Prospero rules as a magician.

Happily, Shakespeare spares the 75-year-old actress the horrors of grappling with an intergalactic man-eating parasite.

A sad and cerebral figure wreaking revenge on the enemies who usurped her, Weaver instead brings her characteristic air. The nut-brown bob that hasn’t changed in half a century (bar the head shave for Alien 3 circa 1992) and that kind, but slightly disappointed, Reverend Mother smile.

Yet Lloyd’s ruse of presenting her as a lone figure perched on a stool, orchestrating her revenge with the help of her spirit fixer Ariel, also isolates her from the rest of the cast. A virtual commentator on the action, her character is barely tested by other actors and her role becomes a recital.

And, as usual, Lloyd’s production is a slave to the microphone. Following his recent Romeo and Juliet starring Tom Holland, his insistence on using mics not only makes everyone look like they’re lip-synching, it paradoxically renders some of the Bard’s finest verse in muttered whispers. 

In The Tempest she takes on the role of Prospero, conventionally played by a man but which works perfectly with Weaver as a former female

Sigourney Weaver teleported into London to make her long-overdue West End debut

The play is a reimagined sci-fi version of Shakespeare’s late play, The Tempest

Patrick Marimon: The set is out of this world, like a Star Trek studio from the 1960s

Soutra Gilmour’s set is, however, genuinely out of this world. Like a Star Trek studio from the 1960s – the William Shatner years – it’s a barren, coal-black slag-heap barely illuminated by distant stars. A lighting designer’s dream, it creates unexpected vistas with huge fabrics that either billow like clouds, or suggest the giant crescents of nearby moons.

Below these, Prospero’s spirit ᴀssistant Ariel, played by Mason Alexander Park, works his master’s magic as an air-borne glam rock star, wearing a blond wig, ruff and corset. And Forbes Mᴀsson has a great deal of subversive fun as a sweatier planetary resident, Caliban, performing lewd gestures in black S&M leather pants and wrestling boots.

If the complexities of the plot in which Prospero teaches her former rivals a lesson are lost in a pruned version of the text, the big gain is the enchantment of music composed by Ben and Max Ringham with Michael ‘Mikey J’ Asante. It’s like Enya’s eerily layered vocal harmonies, with a touch of Vangelis – all reminiscent of Ridley Scott’s film soundtracks.

Even so, I’d like to have seen Weaver’s emotional range stretched a bit more than simply deploying her as an alpha-female observer on her own story. It’s a bit like renting a vintage Cadillac and using it for the weekly shop.