In 1986, Sigourney Weaver completed her second Alien movie and returned to New York’s off-Broadway scene to prove she could do Shakespeare. For Aliens, she received an Academy Award nomination.
For Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice, she received this review from the New York Times: “The Merchant of Venice marks the local Shakespearean debut, in the role of Portia, of Sigourney Weaver and, in all candidness, this is not Ms Weaver’s finest three and one-quarter hours… Together, the director and star seem disoriented by Shakespeare.”
All involved in Weaver’s latest fiasco should have heeded this warning. Just before Christmas, Weaver opened as Prospero in Jamie Lloyd’s new production of The Tempest, Shakespeare’s late play about an exiled duke-turned-magician who tortures his enemies after wrecking them on his desert island, but then attempts to forgive them. Weaver plays the role as a woman at London’s Theatre Royal Drury Lane. Gathered with the glamourati to watch her grand opening, we felt like the Olympic audience watching Raygun the kangaroo-hopping breakdancer for the very first time. From the Times (Two Stars; “That all-around household helper, Alexa, could have breathed more life into the lines”) to the i newspaper: (One Star; “We are light years away from there being anything magical, mystical or magisterial about this Prospero”), the critics issued a drubbing.
The sole exception was the Guardian’s chief theatre critic, who offered a lone four-star review for the production but wrote of Weaver: “[She] is not a masterful Prospero: her verse delivery is flat and featureless, which leaves a vacuum in this key role.” Could this be the production that finally kills off our craze for celebrity Shakespeare?
Film stars have always turned to Shakespeare to assert credibility. Producers are happy to oblige: big names mean advance bookings, even more so if they’re performing a school curriculum text. Theatreland needs this cash. No one in the sector has recovered from the near-extinction event that was Covid, with even the strongest producers struggling with debt, audience decline due to broken theatre-going habits and surging costs. Think how your own electricity bill has risen in recent years, then think how much electricity it takes to light a theatre. Those of us who like to hand out critical scoldings should bear this in mind.
Nonetheless, if theatre is to have a future, it needs to invest in the next generation of audiences. That means staging Shakespeare that keeps us coming back for more. Perhaps the most damning line last week – and I agreed with every syllable – came from the critic Fiona Mountford in the i: “Unforgivably, this is theatre as those who don’t go dread that it will be”.
It’s all very well to pack the punters in to see Lieutenant Ripley onstage, but if the experience teaches them never to try another Shakespeare play again, the West End still loses.
It doesn’t help that Lloyd’s shtick is wearing thin. The director has a limited set of tricks: hire a celeb, dress them in black or grey sportswear, amp up the pop or rock music, dim the lights and play with microphones. In The Tempest, Lloyd’s attempt at minimalism means that his actors aren’t even provided with props essential to their plot twists. A group of buffoons are distracted from treason by a wardrobe full of flashy clothes – but you wouldn’t know this, if you’re struggling with the language, because the characters are reduced to miming their discovery of empty air. Perhaps, like his actors, this emperor has no clothes.
Whoever the director, the chief problem with stunt casting is the challenge of Shakespeare’s language. To audiences and actors unfamiliar with early modern verse, its internal logic can be opaque. Weaver has a proper record as a stage actress in modern plays. But with Shakespeare, as the Observer’s critic Susannah Clapp adroitly wrote: “She is flat: not only unsure of her lines but apparently uncertain of what a line is, delivering phrases as if she were measuring portions on a plate, without a roll or much driving sense.” Weaver seems incapable of continuing a thought or a sentence if it continues beyond the limit of a single scanned line.
Anyone can forget a line. Or, in Weaver’s case, the bulk of her major narrative speech in the first act, an essential bit of storytelling in which Prospero explains his/her backstory. This was the jaw dropper on opening night, the audience wincing as Weaver blanked into panicked silences, and eventually had to have her hand squeezed reassuringly by Mara Huf’s Miranda. To her credit, Weaver managed to continue. But her floundering exposed a bigger problem: without sufficient guidance from Lloyd, this was an actor who clearly didn’t understand or connect with what she was saying. It’s much easier to lose your place if you’re on autopilot.
The debacle may also force a reassessment of the West End’s internet-age system of press nights. Back in the day, critics usually wrote their reviews as a shared record of a single, defining performance.
In the age of digital deadlines, it’s increasingly the norm for newspaper critics to be allowed into one of a handful of final “press previews”, so that reviews are uploaded and ready to drop when an embargo lifts immediately after the gala “opening”, packed with photogenic guests. There are advantages and disadvantages. In this case, it was clear that key critics had not been present to see Weaver crumble under the pressure of “opening night”, even if most noted she was always ropey on lines. It felt like they had missed the story.
The bigger question, however, is how much credibility the West End is prepared to jettison to keep movie star productions running. There have always been big names with the stage chops to match. Tom Hiddleston, who stars in Lloyd’s next production, has already given careful, intellectual interpretations of both Coriolanus and Hamlet. But you can spot a “celebrity Shakespeare” because they depend on the visible presence of their stars, and they invariably patronise their audiences.
Kenneth Branagh spent most of last year’s King Lear, a play about a retired man losing his marbles, stomping around topless with abs contoured by artful lines of mud. (the New Yorker dubbed this Branagh’s “sexy Viking” look.) All directors play with text, but the worst choices are made to keep celebs in the spotlight at all times. A decade ago, Benedict Cumberbatch’s Hamlet featured initial (but full-price) performances which opened with Hamlet on stage – instead of sidelined by exile – and performing his famous, print-it-on-T-shirts soliloquy, “To be or not to be”. As I said at the time: “Imagine a production of Turandot that moved the climactic Nessun Dorma to the opening number just because, post-Pavarotti, football fans can sing along.” Similarly, Weaver’s Prospero is on stage from the show’s first moment and remains there almost constantly, even if doing little. Plonked in a sitting position downstage like a rooted shrub, she is a static presence as the rest of the cast revolve around her.
Meanwhile, Shakespeare’s play is both opaque and dumbed down. Bizarrely for a text now recognised as an early critique of colonialism, Lloyd’s version erases the racist outbursts made by its most villainous characters. Does Lloyd think his audience too delicate to watch the nasty Sebastian snarl with bile about his niece’s marriage “to an African”? Or Matthew Horne, in a performance so luminous it belongs in a better production, cackling about how to make money in England from displaying the corpse of a “dead Indian”? This is a production that does not trust its own audience to understand its ethics.
Realistically, the West End will keep casting movie stars in shallow Shakespeare as long as audiences keep buying tickets. The tragedy is that there’s such better stuff out there: if you want a play that will make you think, you can’t do better than Blanche McIntyre’s savvy production of The Invention of Love, in which Simon Russell Beale plays the classicist AE Housman torn between love poetry and Greek scholarship. Russell Beale, of course, is an expert speaker of Shakespearean verse.
Yet you shouldn’t need a Simon Russell Beale for audiences to leave a Shakespeare production with some improved understanding of his language. It would be a bonus if celebrities learned something about the text, too.
• Kate Maltby writes about theatre, politics and culture
