9:17am Wednesday 16th August 2006
By Chris Gray
In all his years of intergalactic adventure as captain of the Starship Enterprise, Patrick Stewart can have encountered few places much weirder than the magical island he rules over as Prospero in the RSC's new production of The Tempest.
For a start, there's its climate. While it's only a few days sailing from Tunis, the weather and local flora are as far as they could be from Mediterranean. Snow storms rage even as characters discuss the balminess - perhaps they mean barminess - of the breezes and the lushness of the vegetation.
Clothing styles (designer Nicky Gillibrand) are necessarily more Eskimo than the desert island fashions that productions of The Tempest usually offer.
Mr Stewart sets the trend in his first appearance - backwards on - in a huge furry magician's mantle that strangely resembles a totem pole.
Yet all this is not without its textual justification. Prospero's half-human slave Caliban, sympathetically portrayed by John Light, speaks of being confined to "a hard rock" - which ever remains the focal point of Rupert Goold's production, looking in Giles Cadle's design oddly reminiscent of one of Paul Nash's desolate wartime landscapes of dead planes.
And there is also much activity to do with the chopping and carrying of winter wood - during which the romance of Prospero's daughter Miranda (Mariah Gale) and the shipwrecked prince Ferdinand (Nick Court) is charmingly advanced.
It is best, surely, to accept that here is an island that alters according to the beholder. Or, as Prospero explains to the loyal Gonzalo (James Hayes) who is baffled by the strangeness of it all: "You do yet taste some subtleties of the isle, that will not let you believe things certain."
This is the first main house production at Stratford by the gifted Mr Goold, the new artistic director of the Oxford Stage Company. It is an enormous credit to him that he so well captures the oddness of the piece.
Its tone is perhaps best set in the superb performance by Julian Bleach as a world-weary, rather frightening Ariel, who remains uncowed by the considerable powers displayed by his master. But there are potent contributions, too, from Adam Cork's jangling music and sound - perhaps at its best in the astonishing incantations at the young lovers' engagement masque from three chanting, powerfully transported 'goddesses' (Allyson Brown, Golda Rosheuvel and Emma Jay Thomas).
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