The Tempest - Kenneth Branagh’s Prospero plays a masterstroke

Kenneth Branagh walks on to the dimly lit, empty stage, positions himself at a music stand, dons an embroidered robe and raises a conductor’s baton. Percussion thunders, waves heave (in projection) across the stage and sou’westered forms clutch at dangling ropes as they stumble around the tilting stage-cum-deck. From now until he snaps this baton in two at the play’s conclusion, Branagh’s Prospero is the conductor of fantastical happenings across the island where the survivors of the seeming shipwreck are lost and found.

To demonstrate the exiled duke Prospero’s magical agency in this way, at the outset of the action, is fairly usual and, initially, veteran director Richard Eyre’s new staging of the last play solely written by Shakespeare feels almost quaintly old-fashioned, with its Mittel-Europe-influenced costumes, and 19th-century-style use of tricksy projections and spectacular flying mechanism (for Amara Okereke’s glorious airborne Ariel), supported by delightful musical compositions (by Akintayo Akinbode and Stephen Warbeck).

Gradually, though, Eyre builds the tension between the artificiality of the form and the boundary challenging behaviours of the characters. The tentative, wondering eagerness of young love between Miranda and Ferdinand (tenderly expressed by  Ruby Stokes and Fred Woodley Evans). The violent ambitions (in serious and comic modes) of jealous courtiers and drunken servants, and of Ashley Zhangazha’s Caliban (no monster, he mingles comedy and seriousness). Prospero might, through magic, manipulate the actions of others, but he cannot control their hearts.

Eyre’s production shows that the magician’s route back to re-engagement with messy reality is made possible by Ariel and Caliban. The former revives in him emotions of compassion and forgiveness that initiate his transition from magus to mere mortal (Branagh magnificently evoking both the pain and the elation of reconnection). It is from Caliban that Prospero asks permission to leave the island in his closing speech. It is given. He is gone.

The backdrop, the last symbol of artifice, falls. Caliban stands face to face with Ariel, grounded for the first time and trying to find her feet. In our shared reality we confront shared questions. 

The Tempest is at the Royal Shakespeare theatre, Stratford-upon-Avon, until 20 June

Photograph by Johan Persson