Review: THE TEMPEST, Print Room at the Coronet, 25 November 2016

No Mediterranean idyll this island, as coal dust replaces sand and an industrial grey gloomily provides the backdrop for a demanding, but rewarding, version of The Tempest - late Shakespeare given an elegiac tone by director Simon Usher.

Kevin McMonagle channels a little of Ivor Cutler's plaintive Scottish burr as Prospero, a man determined to use his considerable magical powers to get even with his enemies who comes to see that his redemption lies elsewhere. Once the eponymous storm abates (and sound designer Paul Bull gives us the full donner and blitzen), the three interlocking storylines develop.

Charlotte Brimble is charming and voluptuously sexy as Miranda, falling in love with shipwrecked Ferdinand, a bare-chested and bee-sting lipped Hugh John, their romance, tested by Prospero (pulling strings as usual), a rare beam of sunshine in the bleakness.

Meanwhile, Callum Dixon's ambitious Antonio is working on Sebastian (reminding me of Iago slowly provoking Othello) aiming to precipitate a coup against King Alonso, a sonorous Paul Hamilton, who appears oblivious to the danger. He's not helped by kindly courtier Gonzalo, Steven Beard recreating something of Private Godfrey of Dad's Army in his bumbling apparatchik.

The emotional heart of the play lies firmly with Billy Seymour's damaged, Smike-like Caliban, hopelessly falling in platonic love with boozy Stefano whose only attractive quality is that he is not Prospero. The whip marks on Caliban's back speak to Prospero's violence and to the poor lad's slave status, the "monster's" mental illness jarring on 21st century sensibilities. Caliban's keenness to take up arms against his master seems entirely justified on the evidence presented.

It's a take on the relationship between Prospero and Caliban that owes something to the ideas of Michel Foucault: Torture, Punishment, Discipline (even Ferdinand gets a bit of that) and Prison, all in play on the island. Indeed the concept of control is just as strong in Prospero's relationship with the sprite Ariel, a severe, unsmiling Kristin Winters, aching for the freedom her master promises, but never quite delivers, bound by her gratitude for her master's rescue of her from a witch's grasp. She is powerful, but merely a tool for Prospero's machiavellian plots, showing none of the fun Puck invests in his work for Oberon.

Prospero's cruelty lends weight to his closing speech, almost, but not quite, demanding that the audience forgive him his tyranny, as he has forgiven his enemies, even embracing poor Caliban. Of course, there's some of Shakespeare's own voice in that plea, having detained the public at The Globe for many years (his actors too).

With so little colour and so few smiles, the nigh on three hours gets a little gruelling at times, but this production sets itself ambitious targets and delivers on them, forcing us to consider how those in power treat those weaker than themselves or in their debt, morally or financially. That Prospero renounces his powers in order to return to civil society has an important resonance in a year in which the politically powerful have been forced, for good or ill, to relinquish their positions in the face of populist leaders. Perhaps this company should turn its attention to Julius Caesar next, particularly the rhetoric and manipulations of Mark Antony.

The Tempest continues at The Print Room until 17 December.

Photo Marc Brenner.

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