London theatre’s final opening of 2024 has long promised to be one of the juiciest: Hollywood royalty Sigourney Weaver making her West End debut as Prospero in Shakespeare’s elegiac late romance. What a venue Weaver is being afforded, too, the exquisitely restored Theatre Royal Drury Lane, an august 1,996-seater now known as the long-term residence of big musicals. The last time Shakespeare was performed at “The Lane” was in 1957, when John Gielgud starred as Prospero for legendary director Peter Brook. One can only imagine the bewildered chuckles in that great green room in the sky as the bygone greats of British theatre look down on this dismal non-event of a production.
Unforgivably, this is theatre as those who don’t go dread that it will be. Spencer Tracy’s famous dictum about acting states that all one must do is to know one’s lines and not bump into the furniture. Director Jamie Lloyd, the arch minimalist whose bag of tricks is looking worryingly empty now, provides no furniture for Weaver to bump into. No wonder his actors huddle together front stage centre, as if seeking refuge from lurking monsters in the cowering expanses of the Drury Lane stage.
As for speaking her lines, the best one can say for Weaver is that she does. Her wooden delivery never wavers from a tone of blank meditation, and we are light years away from there being anything magical, mystical or magisterial about this Prospero.
James Phoon, as Ferdinand, and Mara Huf, as Miranda, in ‘The Tempest’ at Theatre Royal Drury Lane (Photo: Marc Brenner)Kenneth Branagh’s bizarre Flintstones-era King Lear last year was a recent low point in celebrity Shakespeare outings but this is infinitely worse. Those unfamiliar with the play will be bamboozled from start to finish, such is the lack of clarity and conviction with which the narrative treated.
Even I struggled to understand who everyone was initially – and this is my job. In the all-pervasive Stygian gloom – “Turn the lights on, Jamie!” reads one exasperated line in my reviewing notebook – we just about discern a couple of distant mounds of earth. A gauze sheet is wafted across the stage in classic school play fashion.
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Read MoreThe Tempest contains some of the longest and least amusing drunk scenes in theatre history, but given that we are already out of our minds by this point they barely impact upon us. Mathew Horne, who will surely have a better time of things in the Gavin and Stacey special on Christmas Day, at least injects a bit of liveliness into Trinculo’s delivery. There is one small but welcome outbreak of tenderness between Miranda (Mara Huf) and Ferdinand (James Phoon), and Mason Alexander Park looks like an extra from Cabaret (in which they starred last year) as an ethereally androgynous Ariel.
Weaver eventually shifts from sitting on a box to standing up. “Our revels now are ended” is a hauntingly beautiful line towards the end of The Tempest, but in this production the revels never even come close to starting.
To 1 February (thejamielloydcompany.com)
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