APA, Lyric Theatre March 25-28

Of the theatrical shows playing at this year’s Arts Festival, two productions boasting lauded English directors stole most of the column inches. But while Steven Berkoff’s On the Waterfront, for all its stirring forecasts, proved to be little more than a diverting breeze, Sam Mendes’ The Tempest is the show that blew audiences away.

Mendes may have garnered popular fame in recent years as a film director with the likes of Away We Go, Revolutionary Road, Jarhead and the Oscar-winning American Beauty, but he first rose to prominence as a theatre director, winning four Laurence Olivier Awards and a Tony in a sparkling career on both sides of the Atlantic that has continued to run parallel to his cinematic work.

His production of The Tempest is part of the second season of The Bridge Project, a three-year partnership involving London’s Old Vic Theatre and Neal Street Productions, and the Brooklyn Academy of Music, and as such features an enviable transatlantic cast including British theatre veteran Stephen Dillane as Prospero and Christian Camargo (last seen as the army psychologist in The Hurt Locker) as Ariel. And while The Tempest – Shakespeare’s last play and one of his most consistently intriguing – has oft been mined for its post-colonial themes on these shores (Tsui Hark’s 2008 production being a notable recent example), Mendes’ take is very much concerned with the world-weary restlessness of Prospero, the usurped Duke of Milan given the chance to take revenge on his enemies when they become shipwrecked on his isle of exile.

The staging is at once remarkably simple and deceptively multifaceted: the lion’s share of the action takes place within a circle of sand centre stage, while the actors return to sit motionless in chairs amid a flooded area upstage when not directly involved. To the right of the sand circle, almost in the wings, is Prospero’s library, a modest collection of books beside a desk and coat stand, and it is here we find the deposed duke quietly engrossed in a tome while the audience is still taking its seats. Indeed, it is only when Prospero rises, dons his cloak and begins restively pacing around the circumference of the circle, conjuring the titular tempest, that we can be quite sure the play has begun.

The plot may be driven by Prospero’s god-like manipulation of those he shipwrecks – principally Alonso, King of Naples (Jonathan Lincoln Fried), Alonso’s brother Sebastian (Richard Hansell), Prospero’s trusty friend Gonzalo (Alvin Epstein), Antonio, Prospero’s brother who betrayed him and stole his dukedom (Michael Thomas), and Alonso’s son Ferdinand (Edward Bennett) – and by the latter’s romance with Prospero’s daughter Miranda (Juliet Rylance), but it is Prospero’s contrasting relationships with Ariel and Caliban (Ron Cephas Jones) that lie at the heart of this tale.

And while Jones’ Caliban emphasises the character’s repugnant, treacherous nature over any potentially sympathetic or noble undercurrent, Camargo’s Ariel is an altogether more intriguing prospect. Making his entrance from a door situated at the top of a ramp halfway up the rear façade of the stage wearing a fitted black suit and nothing else, this Ariel carries a subtext of menace and petulance that goes beyond typical portrayals. These drives reach their zeniths, respectively, when Ariel, at the behest of Prospero, terrorises Sebastian and Antonio as they plot to kill Alonso, appearing as some vengeful valkyrie replete with jaggedly violent metal wings, and in his final, contemptuous, parting glance at Prospero when he is at last granted his freedom.

But The Tempest, ultimately, is Prospero’s play, and for all the clever staging, haunting music and engrossing turns from the rest of the cast, it requires a performance of complexity and assurance in this role – and Dillane delivers in spades. His Prospero is a true enigma, a man not so much driven by a thirst for vengeance, but by an almost weary resignation to a task he must complete. His is a restless, joyless Prospero, one who knows only too well the unsalvable nature of the things he has lost during his years in exile, and who realises no redemption awaits at the successful completion of his meticulously wrought plans. And yet somewhere within this there is a sense of the spark he once held, a spark that tangibly fades to nothingness during his evenly delivered closing monologue.

Paul Kay