Cheerless and fussy: The Tempest, at Theatre Royal Drury Lane, reviewed

The Tempest is Shakespeare’s farewell, his final masterpiece or, if you’re being cynical, the play that made him jack it all in. Some actors admit that it can be hard to stage and dull to perform. What is it exactly? A children’s fairy tale and a soppy romance with snatches of drunken farce and political intrigue. Quite a muddle. The setting is famously eccentric. Shakespeare whisks the audience away from reality and drops them in a magical kingdom where a sanctimonious wizard rules over a population of goblins and fairies.

Some directors try to correct the Bard by turning Prospero’s island into an even weirder and less familiar realm. This bad idea has been adopted by Jamie Lloyd in his cheerless version starring Sigourney Weaver. He locates the action in a shadowy moonscape that looks like a gravel-pit or a cheap Doctor Who set from the 1970s. Or is it a helipad on a fog-bound Scottish peninsula? That might explain the swirling mists and the banks of spotlight that cut sharply through the gloom. There’s plenty to look at here, and plenty to listen to as well. The overbearing soundtrack keeps coming up with new ways to irritate your eardrums. Huge loudspeakers linked to the actors’ microphones send the dialogue booming out across the venue like safety announcements on a stalled train.

Weaver plays Prospero as a non-binary chief executive with numerous titles. She doesn’t mind if she’s addressed as ‘lady’, ‘mother’, ‘duchess’, ‘prince’, or ‘lord’. Weaver has plenty of charisma and her clothes are nicely tailored: a gorgeous white shirt, a chunky grey waistcoat and fingerless gloves. She looks like a retired barrister selling cheese at a farmers’ market. Ariel (Mason Alexander Park) seems to be in a separate show, a Las Vegas residency perhaps, with his own lighting and costume designer.