Sigourney Weaver has inhabited some unusual realms in the course of her storied film career. So it’s not overly surprising that the star of “Alien” and “Avatar” might choose to come to the West End in “The Tempest,” Shakespeare’s otherworldly play.
Less anticipated is the degree of hesitancy to her London stage debut at the Theater Royal, Drury Lane, where she is playing in a decidedly muted production, directed by Jamie Lloyd, that runs through Feb. 1, 2025.
The star power of Weaver, now 75, may well attract an audience that doesn’t usually go for Shakespeare. But I’m not sure whether they will emerge after two-and-a-quarter hours much wiser to the wonders of this ravishing play, and those who know it better might ask what happened to its emotional richness.
On a purely aesthetic front, Lloyd and his co-creators deliver, resourcefully deploying sound and lighting to maximum effect. This director’s current Broadway production of “Sunset Boulevard,” playing at the St. James Theater, is also visually arresting — if far more powerfully performed. The sets for “The Tempest,” as with “Sunset Boulevard,” are by Soutra Gilmour, who fills the vast reaches of the Drury Lane stage with forbidding outcrops of land threaded now and again with billowing fabric that lends a shimmering allure worthy of a sci-fi film.
Weaver’s gender-flipped Prospero, the deposed ruler of Milan, is first seen amid the clamor of the shipwreck that starts the play, bringing her usurpers to the island she inhabits alongside her daughter, Miranda (a petulant Mara Huf). The flashing lights subside and Weaver appears, minus the enchanted staff that is this shaman-like character’s defining prop. (Nor do we ever see the all-important book this literary-minded figure is said to possess.)
Onstage throughout from that point through to the end, Prospero takes up various positions around the huge stage, at one point standing motionless while the others circle around her like planets caught up in her orbit.
What the production wants to say about Prospero, or the text itself, is unclear. Is this a story of retribution and revenge, or a parental letting-go, or even a commentary on art itself? It’s difficult to know from the impassive performance by Weaver, who often just looks on from the back of the stage, strangely absent from the narrative.
This actress’s theater work so far has largely tilted toward comedy — not least in the deliciously antic plays of Christopher Durang, whose writing provided a decades-long thread throughout her career.
Prospero’s abundant wit, however, rarely comes into focus. When Miranda marvels at a “brave new world / That has such people in ‘t,” Prospero’s droll reply, “tis new to thee,” passes without notice, as if Weaver were primarily interested in getting through the play without putting a stamp on it.
The Anglo-American cast is a mixed bag. The comic relief in this play is often trying, and I could have done with less of the drunken double act of Stephano (Jason Barnett) and Trinculo (Mathew Horne), as well as the “demi-devil” Caliban (Forbes Masson), who appears from beneath the stage in a black corset.
Others are first-rate. The veteran English actress Selina Cadell is an immediately touching (also gender-flipped) Gonzalo, a beacon of kindness amid the play’s cruel machinations. And the nonbinary American performer Mason Alexander Park — a first-rate Emcee in the ongoing London revival of “Cabaret” — soars literally, as well as figuratively, as Ariel, more than once hovering above the action as if haunting the island with a mournful music all of their own. (Park, a superb vocalist, gets to flex those muscles here.)
Weaver, too, belatedly finds a wistful poetry when Prospero takes leave and acknowledges that “our revels now are ended.” Her early sternness softening toward the close, Weaver gives resonant voice to the famous line “we are such stuff as dreams are made on.” But “The Tempest” we might have dreamed of remains frustratingly out of reach.
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