“I know this play very well. I don’t recognise this version…”
So says Antonia at the end of this production — and that line pretty much sums up my experience too.
This new production of The Tempest, produced by Shakespeare’s Globe and directed by Tim Crouch, takes a deliberately experimental, Brechtian-leaning approach to Shakespeare’s text. Performed in the Sam Wanamaker Playhouse, the play is fragmented: lines are redistributed across characters, some spoken from within the audience, others added in contemporary English. The intention is clear and well articulated — to question power: who gets to speak these words, who gets to be on stage, what shifts when authority or identity change, and how theatre constructs illusion.
On paper, it’s an intellectually strong idea. The Tempest already deals with authorship, control, and theatrical magic. In practice, however, the accumulation of alienation effects quickly becomes overwhelming. Shakespeare’s language is demanding enough; add meta-commentary, modern interjections, audience immersion, and constant disruption, and the task asked of the spectator goes well beyond engagement. At times, it becomes genuinely hard to tell whether confusion is intentional or accidental. While that ambiguity could work in isolation, here it stacks up to the point where you are mostly piecing fragments together rather than following anything with clarity. Unless you know the play very well already, it risks becoming so meta that the story itself all but disappears.
Ironically, the moments that worked best were those where illusion was most clearly broken. When actors spoke plainly, with firm intention and clear stakes, the piece briefly grounded itself. When it slipped back into abstraction, constant motion, and symbolic haze, meaning dissolved again.
Seating matters a great deal in this production. From the extreme right of the stage, close to the actors but outside the main visual axis, I rarely saw faces and had to rely almost entirely on vocal tone. Some visual moments — including action directed towards the back wall — were simply invisible from that angle. In the Sam Wanamaker Playhouse, where intimacy is usually a gift, this reliance on frontal staging works against the idea of full spatial inclusion.
The cast is solid and diverse, with a range of accents and identities that bring welcome texture. However, the different styles of acting are ultimately more alienating than complementary. For instance, Prospero, played by the director himself, is as restrained and minimalist as the drunken servants Trinculo (Mercè Ribot) and Stephano (Patricia Rodriguez) are boisterous and overtly slapstick. My European sensibility welcomed the relief of their light, embodied, almost Baroque humour, finding it paradoxically grounding amidst all this chaos. I am less certain my English counterparts were as taken.
One real standout, in an otherwise visually impaired experience, was the live vocal score by Emma Bonnici and Victoria Couper. Occasionally heavy-handed in its use of sound effects, it nevertheless delivered an eerily effective moment of loss and grief through simple, almost “primitive” vocal work — a reminder that, in a play about storytelling and power, a single sustained tone can sometimes say more than layers of concept.
Overall, this Tempest feels less like a storm you move through than a hurricane that strips away all familiar shelter. Its ambition is real, its intentions thoughtful — but its execution sacrifices coherence for excess. I left admiring the idea more than the experience: engaged but not moved.
Reviewer: Klervi Gavet
Reviewed: 29th January 2026
North West End UK Rating: