The history of dance is littered with versions of The Tempest. With its formal intricacies of music, magic and comedy, there’s a masque-like quality to Shakespeare’s late play that offers seductive possibilities for choreographers. But the work is also a profound and unsettling study of love, revenge and power. And the central flaw of David Bintley’s adaptation is that we’re too often beguiled by the visual action, and too little challenged by the emotional drama.
In collaboration with Rae Smith and an excellent design team, Bintley’s production spins a convincing sense of wonder. The opening sea storm is a marvel of theatrical ingenuity, its roaring, spumy waves conjured from the most delicate of billowing silk. Ariel is all nimble elfin lightness, with Mathias Dingman dancing as elegantly in his flying harness as he does on solid ground. Sally Beamish’s commissioned score is vivid with odd and brilliant colour and Bintley revels in the lively choreographic incidentals that the play affords – his trademark craft and invention channelled into a ship full of hornpiping sailors, a giddily virtuoso Pan and a roisteringly acrobatic Trinculo and Stephano.
Yet Bintley shows less confidence with the dramatic core of his material. By delaying the exposition of Prospero’s history to act two he leaves most of act one without a narrative context. Much more problematically, he fails to find a dance language adequate to the complexity of Prospero’s character. While Iain Mackay is a handsomely dominant presence, we’re shown little of the dark, curdling anger that drives his plotting, nor the light-filled epiphany that drives his sudden conversion to forgiveness.
By the same measure, Prospero’s relationship with Caliban is oversimplified to master and savage. And while we glimpse his paternal tenderness for Miranda (danced with exemplary sweet simplicity by Jenna Roberts) we don’t feel the anguished protectiveness of his love. The point of choreographing Shakespeare is to transform and expand the language through dance. And however pleasing Bintley’s Tempest is as ballet entertainment, however excellently performed, it’s no real match for the magisterial strangeness and moral force of the play.
- At Sadler’s Wells, London, until 15 October. Box office: 020-7863 8000. Then touring until 29 October.
