One of Britain’s most visionary directors, Deborah Warner, kicks off her distinctively bristling programme at Bath’s Ustinov Studio. Opera, contemporary dance and cabaret will follow, but she opens with The Tempest. Shakespeare’s last full play is a meta-theatrical puzzle, and Warner lays out its unconsoling mysteries and honours its sheer strangeness.
After 16 bitter years in exile, Prospero, a usurped duke with magic arts, is given the chance to bring his enemies to his island (Warner largely cuts the chaotic opening shipwreck). His “rough magic” here seems rough both in a disarmingly non-illusionist sense and because it’s mostly used to mess with his victims’ heads. Christof Hetzer’s studio design has installation vibes – bare wooden boards against the walls, little boxes of pebbles and peat, a strip of video screen. This is an island of the mind.
Nicholas Woodeson is sideways casting for Prospero. One of British theatre’s unsung heroes, he’s a witty character actor too rarely cast as top banana. But 34 years ago he played King John for Warner at the RSC, and she calls on him now for her often obstreperous protagonist.
The role of Prospero has been viewed as the ageing playwright preparing for death, but Woodeson reminds us how angry the character is, how his resentment goads the action forward. Impatient beneath monkish white curls, Woodeson doesn’t make Prospero sonorous or beatific. He gets dissenters in a chokehold, bangs on about his daughter’s chastity. And what was his plan when he conjured the tempest? Woodeson shows him thinking, improvising. He’s also strikingly lonely. When Ariel asks: “Do you love me, master?” he blinks and answers from the heart: “Dearly.” Unresolved emotion flickers through the final scene, and never settles.
You don’t go to Warner for chuckles, and the scenes of banter and farce are hard work. Yet this week especially, the undignified, conscience-free scrabble for rule registers strongly. Finbar Lynch is all calculation as Prospero’s brother, laying schemes with a voice like a caress and greeting forgiveness with a mocking laugh.
Cerebral and always vocally lucid, the production is in some ways puritanical, with a distrust – even disgust – for the body’s baser impulses. Edward Hogg’s tormented Caliban and the shipwrecked servants he joins with are a mucky crew. Hogg, in filthy vest and pants, reaches into his kecks to fling poo or pleasure himself. Where some productions question Caliban’s treatment, Warner has him growling and lapping from a bowl like a mutt. His confederates are splattered with mud, dribbled with booze; people recoil from their stench. Pungently presented, it feels like a throwback reading.
Other performances are fresher: in her professional debut, Tanvi Virmani tries to reclaim Miranda. Stroppy and engaged, she’s also her pedagogic father’s daughter – abused by Caliban, she still crouches to help tie his shoelace.
Above all, Dickie Beau plays the spirit Ariel with mesmerising stillness, an uncanny vessel for the play’s marvels. His T-shirt bears the word “invisible” and Prospero never meets his eye. It wouldn’t be a Warner production without Fiona Shaw, her great collaborator, so Beau – theatre’s master of lip-sync – lets Shaw’s recorded voice roll through him, moving in a poised kabuki glide. When Prospero upbraids him, his face stretches in a silent howl, sinews tautened in painful extremity, yet his eyes grow wet as he urges Prospero to make peace with his captives. He’s all illusion – yet his strength of feeling is enthralling.
At the Ustinov, Bath, until 6 August
