The Tempest - Shakespeare's Globe

I love the Globe. £5 to see a production like The Tempest is a complete bargain.

With a sold-out auditorium, the sun shining and a sense of summertime in the air, Saturday 29^th June was a brilliant afternoon to go to Shakespeare’s Globe. I was in a good mood before I went in, I laughed a lot during the performance, and the just-under-three-hour running time flew by without my feet aching at all.

I don’t exactly know where to begin with writing about this production, because it just hung together so beautifully as a whole. It almost seems a shame to pull out any particular bits. There wasn’t a single weak link in the cast and the mixture of humour and poignancy was perfectly balanced.

I’m not sure I’ve seen a production of The Tempest that was this funny before. Right from the start – where the actor playing Trinculo (Trevor Fox) came on to remind people to turn their mobile phones off and told us that the afternoon’s production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream would be starting shortly – a teasing, light-hearted tone was set. And this carried on throughout the afternoon. Even Miranda and Ferdinand – characters who can often be a bit insipid – were laugh-out-loud funny as played by Jessie Buckley and Joshua James in this production.

But then there were moving moments too: the final speech by Prospero (Roger Allam); the halting way Ariel (Colin Morgan) asked if Prospero loved him; the petals falling from the rafters during the wedding masque. I actually saw people picking up some of these tissue paper petals and taking them home as souvenirs.

The music, too, was really effective in conjuring that idea of an isle full of noises (a description familiar to everyone now as part of the Olympics ceremony speech). From the unaccompanied singing in parts to the way music came from unidentified parts of the auditorium – even to the noisy aircraft flying overhead – it all contributed to the feeling that the language being spoken by the human characters was overlaid on top of this ‘natural’ state and was almost usurping the place of music on the island.

That reading would certainly fit the rest of the plot, which is largely concerned with usurping in one form or another. I’m trying to resist going into a deeper analysis of the text of The Tempest (postcolonialism, language, the place of magic – all that kind of stuff). But I will just say that the major themes I took away from this particular production were all to do with power and redemption.

A few other bits of flotsam and jetsam before I finish: the model ship ‘sailing’ over the audience at the beginning really reminded me of Bristol Old Vic’s production of Swallows and Amazons a year or so ago; Sam Cox’s Stephano reminded our group variously of Bill Nighy and John Cleese in his mannerisms and silly walks; and – as someone said of Jessie Buckley’s post I'd Do Anything career as the audience traipsed out of the Globe at the end – ‘well, that was better than Oliver’!

To me, watching The Tempest felt like watching a production from Mark Rylance’s heyday at this theatre. Especially with the jig at the end. It never feels like a proper Globe production unless there’s a jig at the end.