If you were to come across a gang of expensively tailored men with shades, wires and shoulder holsters becoming increasingly disorientated on a beach, you might be forgiven for assuming you had tuned in to the latest cult TV series. It certainly seems to have been Greg Hersov's intention to produce a radical, 21st-century Tempest for the Lost generation.
There is some justification for this approach. The Tempest is a social experiment conducted in real time (the usurping lords marvel that the whole experience "cannot be three hours") and the backbiting, petty vendettas and arguments over a limited supply of alcohol all seem familiar. Jonathan Keeble's camp Sebastian has a waspish wit millions would tune in to see, while Russell Dixon's Alonso exercises a manipulative malevolence that quickly tips any social occasion towards discord.
While the lords engage in the survival of the fittest, elsewhere one follows the development of a Shakespearean Love Island. Oliver Kieran-Jones's blond, tanned Ferdinand is such a paparazzi-friendly piece of eye-candy it is perfectly believable that Samantha Robinson's Miranda has never seen the like before. And then there is Big Brother, though Pete Postlethwaite's Prospero is perhaps closer to an elderly uncle: obtuse, a bit crabby and clothed perhaps unwisely in a sarong. Yet whereas many Prosperos commit the sin of seeming rather too pleased with themselves, Postlethwaite is a most touchingly fallible magician.
Postlethwaite brilliantly overcomes the contortions of Shakespeare's least-clarified exposition by recounting Prospero's story with the furrow-browed concentration of a man who has yet to place all the facts in order for himself. His dealings with Steven Robertson's Ariel and Simon Trinder's Caliban display the tenderness and cruelty that are flip sides of the same unstable personality. And when he speaks, with tears in his eyes, of the great globe dissolving, he sounds less like a master who once commanded the elements than a man who has disassembled the universe and mislaid some of the bits.
Hersov's production falters in finding an adequate solution for the masque - the pre-recorded roll-call of Royal Exchange alumni is a nice way to celebrate the theatre's 30th anniversary, though such a self-reverential intrusion runs the risk of breaking the spell rather than enhancing it. Yet Peter Mumford's stark lighting complements the gentle illumination provided by Postlethwaite, in a performance of profound humility that comes close to definitive.
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