Published: 01 July 2010
by SIMON WROE

HAS any character in literature enjoyed such influence as Prospero in The Tempest? 

The exiled duke holds an island in his thrall: actions happen only by his leave and sleep steals at his bidding; he wills the very elements. 

“His art is of such power,” his slave Caliban says. “It would control my dam’s god Setebos.” Sam Mendes’ name might be on the posters, but his protagonist has largely usurped directorial duties.

The last play Shakespeare wrote alone begins with a magical shipwreck, casting the conspirators who overthrew Prospero and their entourage onto the strange isle he now rules. 

At the Old Vic, where The Tempest is being performed in repertoire with As You Like It, the players remain on Tom Piper’s restrained ripple-lit set throughout, stepping forward into a circle of sand when they are animated by the magician’s charms.

The great magus is also ever-present, seated stage left, nose buried in one of the many books from which he derives his power, a true Enlightenment man. 

Stephen Dillane, with his gimlet eyes and hair like steel wool, makes a fine, if quiet Prospero, though his enchanted minions threaten to upstage him.

Christian Camargo’s Ariel is force and feyness perfectly pitched, and who could top Ron Cephas Jones’s entrance as Caliban? He rises limb by limb from the earth itself, the curses on his breath his sole “profit” from the gift of language.

The choice of Cephas Jones, a black actor, as the “credulous monster”, may prompt the traditional cries of imperialist allegory, but Mendes’ elegant production is perhaps better viewed as a treatise on the potency of imagination, and the limits of that art.

When Prospero stands divested of his magic in the final scene, the other characters restored and redeemed and “melted into air”, he addresses another power, greater than his own. 

“Release me from my bands / with the help of your good hands,” he asks the audience. 

Only we can break the spell.

Until August 21 • 0844 871 7628 • Old Vic, The Cut, Waterloo,  SE1