The Tempest

by William Shakespeare

seen at the Donmar King's Cross Theatre on 15 December 2016

Harriet Walter plays Prospero in this production directed by Phyllida Lloyd and designed by Chloe Lamford. It forms the third of a trilogy (the first two being Julius Caesar and Henry IV, a conflation of Shakespeare's two Henry IV plays) with all-female casts, purported to be performed by the inmates of a women's prison. The first two plays were performed in the Donmar Warehouse in 2014 and 2015, and have been revived at the temporary King's Cross site in conjunction with The Tempest. I have not revisited the two earlier productions, although it would have been instructive to see them all as there are intriguing correspondences between the Shakespearean parts played and the characters of the prisoners that the actors have developed in consultation with the Prison Partnership Project.

The setting is instituionalised and unsettling. Shortly before the auditorium is opened to the audience, alarms blare in the foyer and the public is herded apart to allow guards to march a group of prisoners through the foyer to disappear behind the entry doors. Then we, the audience, are allowed through these same doors but corralled into a the brightly lit corridors, 'left if your ticket is North or East, right if it is South or West', with firm requests to wait against the walls to avoid congestion, to switch off phones and not to take photographs, to take a torch and use it under instruction, but not to leave the building with it afterwards. The seating is ranks of plastic chairs on rostra around a central acting space marked with lines obviously belonging to a sports hall. How can The Tempest work in this environment?

The answer is that it works extremely well. The text has been cut - no mention of Claribel and the trip to Africa which 'explains' why the King of Naples and his party are on the high seas - but the plys begins with a cacophany of prison noises acting as the opening storm. There are numerous references in the play to imprisonment, retribution, guilt, responsibility, forbearance and forgiveness, and these are rendered even more powerful and apposite through being spoken and demonstrated in a prison environment, by prisoners some of whom have no expectation of release from their sentences. Harriet Walter's 'character' Hannah, for example, is serving a life sentence for a political crime. Prospero's great struggles with power and its relinquishment, the amazing reveries about life and artifice, the great farewell speech to the audience, are rendered even more poignant as the other prisoners bid her farewell and leave her as their own releases are imagined at the close of the play. 

In the meantime, the familiar story is acted with wonderful energy and conviction, under the ever-present reminder that we are witnessing it in a peculiar space. Leah Harvey and Sheila Atim make a delightfully fresh Miranda and Ferdinand, while Jade Anouka's Ariel embodies the mercurial strangeness of the airy spirit. When the king's party arrives on the island, it is played as the arrival of new prisoners having to discard their civilian clothes and accept prison garb - even Ferdinand has his passport confiscated by Ariel-as-warder on his first appearance, Sophie Stanton's Caliban is truculent and vengeful, making an unexpected last ditch grab at Miranda in the final scene - but it is only she at the end left vacuuming the floor as Hannah (Prospero divested of all arts) lies on her bed reading Margaret Atwood's Hag-Seed, a re-telling of The Tempest. 

The scene in which a feast is turned to carrion is cleverly re-imagined as one in which the costly restaurant food dreamed of by the prisoners is joltingly revealed to be bland prison fare, while Prospero's masque for Miranda and Ferdinand is a series of helium balloons with projections both of exotic tropical holidays and of far more mundane but still longingly missed treats such as a MacDonalds meal. The balloons are savagely burst by a distraught Prospero - or is it a distraught Hannah? It is hard to know which is more affecting - the coos of delight by all the prisoners at such visions of the outside world, or the Prospero's heartrending need to break the illusion.

In this setting, the emotional power of the play was rendered more directly than many other productions I have seen; it was a profoundly satisfying experience and a fitting culmination to the project, even if it seemed at first a surprising choice after the first two more obviously political plays. Where they revealed that an all-female cast can successfully bring new insights to what are conventionally regarded as entirely masculine plays, this Tempest shows that humanity need not be tied questions of gender at all.