The Tempest
Novello, London WC2
Rupert Goold's thrilling production of The Tempest begins with ice and ends in fire. The evening has a clear arc: the beginning of a thaw, a gradual relaxing of authority, a slow progress towards warmth of feeling.
Goold has imagined Prospero's island as a polar place, and the King's exile as a winter spell. Giles Cadle's design piles up glacial rocks; Inuit goddesses keen over the young lovers; Ariel springs bloodied and skeletal from the belly of a giant fish. Adam Cork's soundscape grates like an Arctic wind.
Patrick Stewart, in top form as a speaker of Shakespearean verse, creates a Prospero who's imposing and callous. Mariah Gale's Miranda - gentle, gawky and asexual, as well she might be after a childhood of isolation - puts her hand up when she wants to speak to her dad, like a Stepford daughter.
The worst you could say about Goold's production, in which the clowns are actually funny, is that too much is going on. Better too much than too little. This puts Goold, whose enthralling Glass Menagerie is playing a few streets away, in the front rank of young directors.
