The Tempest review

Jon Clark’s lush, tactile lighting establishes a fluid, subaqueous gloom, then pierces it with precise streaks of cold silver and warm copper light, beams intersecting to discover characters striking heroic poses, or freeze them in moments of magically induced seizure.

At the centre of this shifting world, Weaver’s Prospero is a faint, melancholy presence, her delivery flat and frequently tentative. Pensive and watchful, she remains seated on stage throughout, observing the characters she has caught in her magical machinations, responding to their follies and underhand plots with unexpected compassion. There is never a sense that Weaver’s Prospero sincerely seeks revenge on the nobles who wronged her. Instead, the dispossessed Duke seems motivated by a keen sense of her own mortality, intending only to restore her family name and arrange a suitable marriage for her daughter with the time she has left.

Mara Huf gives Miranda a sour, snarky energy, clashing with Prospero with all the built-up antagonism you would expect from a teenager trapped on a deserted island with their overbearing mother. But she shares some warm chemistry with James Phoon’s Ferdinand – played here as an appealing, uncomplicated jock with a nice line in physical comedy.

But it’s Mason Alexander Park’s equally unsettling and beguiling Ariel who makes the strongest impression. Descending menacingly from above on ropes or stalking the black dunes wrapped in billowing silks, they growl, roar, and hiss their lines with an electrifying feral intensity, then break into gorgeously delicate song, driving home the unearthly strangeness that permeates Prospero’s island, and this production as a whole.