Productions of The Tempest tend to fall into easily classifiable groups: colonial myth, spectacular masque or theatrical metaphor. Following the example of Sam Mendes at Stratford some years back, Michael Grandage's new version opts for the last. But while it is staged with admirable economy and yields a compelling performance from Derek Jacobi, the production rarely offers any challengingly fresh perspective.
You get the general idea the moment you see Jacobi's Prospero poised behind Christopher Oram's crumbling, upstage proscenium arch, like a manipulative actor-manager. This yields the production's finest visual coup when Jacobi absorbs the ship's billowing sailcloth inside his magic book.
But the notion of The Tempest as a study in theatrical illusion diminishes its political power. Caliban, despite an energetic performance from Louis Hilyer, is reduced from a colonially exploited figure into a credulous slave who simply swaps masters. And where Michael Boyd's recent RSC production turned the usurping Antonio into a serial Machiavellian schemer, here he is merely an attendant lord who poses a minimal physical threat.
This is the flaw in treating the play as a theatrical fantasy conjured up by Prospero: if he is omnisciently running the show, nothing can ever go wrong. Jacobi's only answer is to excavate the elements of conflict within the character. There is a guilty self-reproach about his absorption in "secret studies". Testiness mixes with vanity when he reminds Ariel that it was "mine art" that released him from the cloven pine.
The chief pleasure lies in encountering an actor who can shape the verse to his will. In his great speech of renunciation, Jacobi rises to a thrilling Gielgudian crescendo on "graves at my command have waked their sleepers" before abjuring his rough magic. And by the time he gets to his departing words, delivered with the utmost simplicity, he has us in the palm of his hands.
In short, this is an actor's Tempest. Even the magic is simply staged, so that the illusory banquet resembles the dessert trolley in an Italian restaurant. Although I have seen more rigorous productions, the words come through with unusual clarity; for once you can hear what they are saying in the opening storm. And Daniel Evans's Ariel, metamorphosing into a butterfly or a fruit bat at his master's command, is a musical, sweet-souled creature never likely to spit in Prospero's face, as in the Mendes version.
It all makes for a perfectly pleasant evening. But, although there is another Tempest on tour, I begin to wonder if we haven't lately wrung all possible variations on Shakespeare's island fling, and if the play itself would not benefit from a period of benign neglect.
· Until October 19. Box office: 0114-249 6000.
