Tempest Review – Tim Crouch’s high-concept treatment softens the magic | stage

T“The Tempest” seems like the quintessential Shakespearean drama for the empiricist. It is all about artifice, after all, and questions the construction of art as illusion through Prospero’s cruel magic. So a pairing with experimental writer, actor and director Tim Crouch seems like a natural fit. Or rather unnatural because this haunting, high-concept production so comprehensively underscores its artifice.

It so emphatically breaks the fourth wall that the drama becomes so full of messages about theatre, the act of watching is exhausting. Maybe that’s the point? The actors often sit in a circle, barely moving, as if they were in rehearsal. Sometimes they stumble over their lines, which are sometimes finished by someone else or spoken in unison.

Miniature models symbolizing the characters brought from the shipwreck are placed in a row as they tell their stories, to suggest that the act of telling stories and pretending is a form of control and manipulation.

Crouch plays Prospero, a mix between a miserly farmer and a festival-goer with a hint of Worzel Gummidge. Miranda (Sophie Steer) is alternately cheerful and volatile. Caliban (Faisal Abdullah) is wearing a Gascoigne football shirt and slippers, with nothing ‘beast’ about him. Ariel (Naomi Werthner) is a decidedly understated person, with the watchfulness of a wise and sombre owl, in an embroidered dress indicative of this island’s indigenous culture. Both characters clearly reject Prospero’s definition of them, and Caliban sometimes speaks in Malay-Singaporean language – to resist his definitions and dominance as a whole?

The production also reduces Prospero’s lines, breaking them down into other characters. It’s interesting as a concept, but where does this postcolonial decentralization fit into Prospero as the all-controlling colonizer that the play and this production also assert?

Actors emerge from the audience, some stand up from their seats, some rush toward the stage, and then return to watch the play afterwards. It’s refreshing when this happens for the first time — funny, contrarian, and original. It is the same when the singers appear in the aisles and balconies, making Crouch’s preoccupation with active interaction with the audience (although here the actors “act” like the audience).

You wonder who is the audience and who is the actor, which is an interesting idea but the trick is played over and over until it seems didactic, as if something is being taught to us in these refractions of theatrical tradition. For a play that deals with subterfuge so quickly, the reveal of its subterfuge feels wooden and over-emphasized.

When it works, it sparks a serious spark, as when Prospero stops mid-sentence and asks an audience member to put down his phone. Is this real or part of the play? And Rachana Jadhav’s collection is a thing of beauty, with a museum-like quality of disputed “exotic” artefacts belonging to other lands, and a model boat whirling around when Prospero conjures a storm.

The production comes to life in the second half, where décor and lighting create magic even if the play attempts to disavow Prospero’s (and Shakespeare’s) study of chemistry. There are a lot of interesting ideas. And it’s a shame that there’s something medical about it: the idea that this is good for us. Drama feels unsatisfying when it’s sacrificed entirely to the high concept, and may be confusing to someone encountering it for the first time.

Antonia (Prospero’s usurping sister, played by Amanda Hadingo) is the kind of high-achieving conservative who leaves mid-scene. “I know this story but I don’t know it at all… I’m going to write to the Telegraph,” she says in one of the funniest moments. It frustrates naysayers, and it’s also painful, especially for the Guardian reader, who feels his own sense of frustration.