The Tempest with Kenneth Branagh at the RSC – review

It stretches credulity almost to the realms of a late Shakespearean plot line to realise that the 83-year-old Richard Eyre has never before directed for the RSC. His new production of The Tempest, featuring the return to an RSC stage for the first time in 30 years by Kenneth Branagh, is thus a landmark for several reasons.

In a full-circle moment at press night, it was fitting to see former artistic director Adrian Noble – the man who cast Branagh as Hamlet in his own landmark production back in the 1990s – enjoying the spectacle of this latest addition to his present-day successors Daniel Evans and Tamara Harvey’s roster.

And spectacle is the word. Eyre has elected to lean into the visual grandeur of Shakespeare’s last complete solo play, with its masques, magic and monsters peopling an undiscovered island, helping to ease the understanding of this famously obscure text with clear storytelling and a brisk hour-each-way running time. Set designer Bob Crowley aids this feat considerably, with a simple staging centred on a large tilting disk and supplemented by sumptuous video projections by Akhila Krishnan.

Creatively, everything is lush, from Hugh Vanstone’s deliberately theatrical lighting and Fotini Dimou’s mainly period costumes to the rich music of Akintayo Akinbode and Stephen Warbeck, performed live (for how much longer since the controversial axing of the entire music department?) and featuring frequent sung interventions.

Chief among the stunning vocalists is Amara Okereke’s whimsical Ariel, suspended on wires for almost the whole show but beautifully athletic and ethereal in spite of the constraints. Ruby Stokes also gives a spirited performance as Miranda, the daughter of the overthrown Duke of Milan, Prospero, whose amazement at seeing other humans for the first time in her young life is both credible and touching.

There’s an interesting take on the subplot involving Prospero’s enforced servant Caliban, an indigenous island inhabitant whose enslavement is here portrayed as the colonial piracy that it really is. The choice to make Ashley Zhangazha’s Caliban a knowing puppet master to the two drunken mariners who want to rule the island themselves is not, for my money, fully supported by the text, but it certainly brings contemporary notions of slavery into sharp perspective.

And what of Branagh’s Prospero, the draw that will undoubtedly see this production transfer to London? Well, aside from the joy of seeing him back on a Stratford stage, it’s by turns electrifying and weirdly underpowered, as if the actor is not quite settled on exactly who his character is: vindictive slave master out for retribution, protective father ruling over a wilful daughter with a rod of iron, or simply a tired old man grieving the loss of his dukedom, his former life and, soon, his daughter?

The touches of brilliance – his Fantasia-like conducting of the storm, his book of magic a music score, his staff a conductor’s baton – are truly magical, accompanied entertainingly by some genuine illusions (by Chris Fisher). And maybe the subtle confusion is deliberate. Either way, he’s always magnetic to watch, with a delivery that’s constantly surprising and energetic, and with an ensemble production that might even be threaded with Eyre’s own valedictory overtones; it certainly makes for an intriguing return to the home of Shakespeare.