Black and white magic

The Tempest
Courtyard Theatre, Stratford-upon-Avon

Othello
Hackney Empire

No accident, one guesses, that the RSC comes good in the new year with two of Shakespeare’s most racially sensitive plays in touring productions that, happily, are at once bold and deeply rewarding.

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Rod Liddle

Sack the judges

‘A Tempest roars out of Africa’, trumpeted the Telegraph’s headline to a preview of a production hailing from Cape Town’s famous Baxter Theatre. And the headline gets it right, for the identification of Prospero’s spirits with a dazzling conjuration of African tribal magic brings a buzz to the play that fits perfectly with Antony Sher’s terrific debut in the leading role. As with the RSC’s recent welcoming to Stratford of a Japanese Titus Andronicus, an Arabian Richard III and an Indian Midsummer Night’s Dream, the rediscovery of Shakespeare through foreign eyes yet again proves a revelation.

It’s a rare staging these days that doesn’t crank up The Tempest as a metaphor for colonialism, but the South African ‘truth and reconciliation’ context has produced a very fair take on the competing claims to the isle of Caliban and Ariel as indigenous blacks and Prospero who, after all, only had his role as colonialist thrust upon him by his wicked brother. What matters is that the director Janice Honeyman, Sher’s sometime South African classmate, creates no agitprop but simply a brilliant theatrical entertainment. Prospero only has to wave his staff for the stage to erupt with exotic musical rhythm accompanying a veritable carnival of maskers, towering puppets and fabulous animals.

Sher’s richly bewhiskered Prospero is not above being swept up in the partying of his joyously cackling and whooping spirits. Swapping his magician’s cloak for a battered panama he becomes an attentive gardener, fussing about his plot. This is not a displaced Olympian like Gielgud, but a roundly human figure, his authority tempered with humour and the capacity to be moved and to forgive.