One of Britain’s most visionary administrators, Deborah Warner, kicks off her distinctively bristling programme at Bathtub’s Ustinov Studio. Opera, modern dance and cabaret will comply with, however she opens with The Tempest. Shakespeare’s final full play is a meta-theatrical puzzle, and Warner lays out its unconsoling mysteries and honours its sheer strangeness.
After 16 bitter years in exile, Prospero, a usurped duke with magic arts, is given the possibility to convey his enemies to his island (Warner largely cuts the chaotic opening shipwreck). His “tough magic” right here appears tough each in a disarmingly non-illusionist sense and since it’s largely used to mess along with his victims’ heads. Christof Hetzer’s studio design has set up vibes – naked picket boards towards the partitions, little bins of pebbles and peat, a strip of video display screen. That is an island of the thoughts.
Nicholas Woodeson is sideways casting for Prospero. Certainly one of British theatre’s unsung heroes, he’s a witty character actor too hardly ever solid as high banana. However 34 years in the past he performed King John for Warner on the RSC, and she or he calls on him now for her typically obstreperous protagonist.
The position of Prospero has been considered because the ageing playwright making ready for demise, however Woodeson reminds us how indignant the character is, how his resentment goads the motion ahead. Impatient beneath monkish white curls, Woodeson doesn’t make Prospero sonorous or beatific. He will get dissenters in a chokehold, bangs on about his daughter’s chastity. And what was his plan when he conjured the tempest? Woodeson exhibits him considering, improvising. He’s additionally strikingly lonely. When Ariel asks: “Do you're keen on me, grasp?” he blinks and solutions from the guts: “Dearly.” Unresolved emotion sparkles by the ultimate scene, and by no means settles.
You don’t go to Warner for chuckles, and the scenes of banter and farce are exhausting work. But this week particularly, the undignified, conscience-free scrabble for rule registers strongly. Finbar Lynch is all calculation as Prospero’s brother, laying schemes with a voice like a caress and greeting forgiveness with a mocking snicker.
Cerebral and all the time vocally lucid, the manufacturing is in some methods puritanical, with a mistrust – even disgust – for the physique’s baser impulses. Edward Hogg’s tormented Caliban and the shipwrecked servants he joins with are a mucky crew. Hogg, in filthy vest and pants, reaches into his kecks to fling poo or pleasure himself. The place some productions query Caliban’s therapy, Warner has him growling and lapping from a bowl like a mutt. His confederates are splattered with mud, dribbled with booze; folks recoil from their stench. Pungently offered, it seems like a throwback studying.
Different performances are more energizing: in her skilled debut, Tanvi Virmani tries to reclaim Miranda. Stroppy and engaged, she’s additionally her pedagogic father’s daughter – abused by Caliban, she nonetheless crouches to assist tie his shoelace.
Above all, Dickie Beau performs the spirit Ariel with mesmerising stillness, an uncanny vessel for the play’s marvels. His T-shirt bears the phrase “invisible” and Prospero by no means meets his eye. It wouldn’t be a Warner manufacturing with out Fiona Shaw, her nice collaborator, so Beau – theatre’s grasp of lip-sync – lets Shaw’s recorded voice roll by him, transferring in a poised kabuki glide. When Prospero upbraids him, his face stretches in a silent howl, sinews tautened in painful extremity, but his eyes develop moist as he urges Prospero to make peace along with his captives. He’s all phantasm – but his energy of feeling is enthralling.
On the Ustinov, Bathtub, till 6 August
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