Theatre review — The Tempest at the Globe is gaudy, playful and smart

The Tempest

Shakespeare’s Globe, London

The marooned sorcerer Prospero (Ferdy Roberts) wears eye-wateringly brief yellow Speedos; his daughter Miranda (Nadi Kemp-Sayfi) lounges on a pink flamingo inflatable; the shipwrecked courtiers end up in giant crates amid flotillas of washed-up rubber ducks.

In Sean Holmes’s new staging, Shakespeare’s magical isle is a gaudy mix of Love Island and a package holiday gone wrong: a tropical paradise littered with tourist detritus and cargo spillage and attended by disgruntled locals. Here Caliban (Ciarán O’Brien) is dressed as a bedraggled resort employee, while Ariel (Rachel Hannah Clarke) is a much-abused local, her requests for freedom brushed off by a distracted Prospero.

It’s a smart and often funny approach, fusing the questions about ownership and colonialism thrown up by the play with contemporary environmental concerns and a caustic sense of what it means to use the world as your playground. There are pointed references to the click-and-deliver lifestyle: the feast served by the spirits of the isle to the marooned courtiers resembles the fast food delivered by gig workers.

Against this background, the play’s concerns about masters and servants, ownership and displacement, power and mutiny unfold playfully but vividly. The shipwrecked statesmen ramble round the island trying to assert themselves and fantasising about taking it over. There’s even a hint that the whole story is in Prospero’s head: some holiday fancy of revenge over his wrongdoers, of his own magnanimous clemency and of controlling his daughter’s love life.

But Holmes also relishes the deliberate theatricality of the play: Ariel hoses down the cast to create the tempest; Prospero frequently stands back to survey his handiwork, like a dramatist making adjustments. The ubiquitous plastic — palm trees, lobster-shaped inflatables, crates, ducks — makes an ecological point, but at the same time plays into the idea of the island as stage set.

The production is sprinkled with such neat, witty insights — when the feast is magically snatched away from the treasonous politicians, the loyal Gonzalo (Peter Bourke, very funny) is spared and continues to eat. There’s also nice comic business at the hands of George Fouracres’ boozily sarcastic Stefano.

There are audibility issues, however, and the plot takes too long to pull into focus. And what gets lost at sea is a greater sense of the real darkness in this play and the profound beauty of its emotional journey towards forgiveness and reconciliation. Roberts skilfully turns the mood at the end, delivering his late speeches with gravity and bittersweet regret. But there’s a transformative grace available in this play, as Prospero lets go of his art, his power, his daughter and his grievance, and as it brings the courtiers to new wisdom by deracinating and disempowering them. This is a vibrant production and the ensemble achieve great rapport with the audience, but it could venture more into the depths.

★★★☆☆

To October 22, shakespearesglobe.com

Chasing Hares

Young Vic, London

Exploitation is also the focus of Chasing Hares. Sonali Bhattacharyya’s new play asks searching questions about the gig economy, workers’ rights and the effectiveness of theatre in addressing social issues. In Milli Bhatia’s production, it tackles the scourge of cheap goods and employee abuse, drawing parallels between Amba (Saroja-Lily Ratnavel), a young fast-food delivery driver in contemporary Britain, and her father Prab (Irfan Shamji), a factory worker in West Bengal 20 years earlier. Both find themselves at the whim of the market, she waiting for the app to send her a job, he queueing outside a clothing factory for a day’s employment.

After setting up the framework, Bhattacharyya focuses on Kolkata, where Prab gets a lucky break. A part-time writer, he manages to persuade the factory owner’s son Devesh (Scott Karim), who fancies himself as an actor, to let him write a new drama for the local jatra (folk theatre) troupe. To the delight of Devesh’s frustrated co-star Chellam, played with fiery intelligence by Ayesha Dharker, Prab smuggles a story about resistance and collective action into an invented spin-off of the Mahabharata. But Devesh foils him by promoting him. At last Prab and his wife have security for themselves and their baby daughter, but the cost will turn out to be high.

The play talks potently about artistic integrity and it mirrors what Prab tries to do by ending with a call to arms for modern-day exploited workers. It’s rather uneven as a piece of drama, however. It’s too obvious and engineered at times, and while the fables that Prab passes on to his daughter are important, they slow down the plot and take space that could be spent getting more intimately into the characters’ moral dilemmas. As it is, some dialogue has to do too much heavy-lifting and so feels more schematic than organic. That’s a shame, as this is a vivid, ambitious and significant piece of theatre tackling a grievous, pressing issue.

★★★☆☆

To August 13, youngvic.org 

Sister Act

Eventim Apollo, London

“The collection plate is going around,” says Jennifer Saunders’ Mother Superior in Sister Act, fixing the audience with a hard stare. “Don’t move.” 

If the notion ever takes her, Saunders could always take up the calling — she has a side-eye glance that could get the devil on his knees and I’ll bet she could deliver a sermon. Until then, here she is presiding over a down-at-heel convent in 1970s Philadelphia, where every nickel is necessary and, with a sinfully tone-deaf sisterhood, every sung mass an act of penance.

But the Lord moves in mysterious ways. The convent acquires a new recruit in the shape of Deloris Van Cartier, a nightclub singer who witnessed her gangster boyfriend murdering an informant and who needs to hide until the trial. Aghast at what is being done to music in the name of the Almighty, Deloris takes over the choir and gets them singing from the same hymn sheet. One thing leads to another and before you can say “amen”, boogie has saved the convent, the day and possibly the Church itself.

This 2006 musical by Alan Menken and Glenn Slater is a slight but heartwarming story of belief, sisterhood and second chances. Bill Buckhurst’s staging was supposed to run in 2020 with Whoopi Goldberg (who starred in the original film) as Deloris, but Covid put paid to that. Now it arrives with Goldberg co-producing and a starry cast, including the great Clive Rowe as police officer Eddie Souther and Lesley Joseph as a peppery old nun who finds her inner disco diva. At the helm now is Beverley Knight as Deloris and what a fabulous job she does, blasting the heavens with her sensational, soaring voice and lifting the evening with sheer force of personality.

Elsewhere, the show is more amiable than amazing, with a few standout musical numbers but a fair few forgettable ones too. Rowe is great in his solo but criminally underused; Lizzie Bea is wonderfully touching as the novice who discovers her singing voice — and her voice as an independent young woman. Not quite heaven-sent, then, but a cheering musical, celebrating sisterhood and solidarity and ending on an upbeat inclusive high.

★★★☆☆

To August 30, then touring, sisteractthemusical.co.uk