The Tempest at Courtyard Theatre, Stratford - review Antony Sher captures the turbulence of Prospero in this deeply felt performance of Shakespeare's great last play.

 

By Charles Spencer Last Updated: 8:59AM GMT 19 Feb 2009

This is as moving and beautiful a production of Shakespeare's great last play as you are likely to encounter, continually inventive, bursting with spectacle and deep emotion, and proving, yet again, that Shakespeare is our contemporary.

The play was written in 1611, as British ships explored the world, and it has become a modish critical concept to view the drama as a study of colonialism. But I have never seen the idea take such soaring flight as it does in this South African production presented by the Baxter Theatre Centre of Cape Town in collaboration with the RSC.

The Tempest becomes a potent drama about apartheid South Africa, with John Kani's Caliban inevitably reminding one of Nelson Mandela as he declares: "This island's mine." Antony Sher's magnificent, anguished Prospero, meanwhile, controls the black man he uses and abuses with a sjambok but comes to learn that "the rarer action is in virtue than in vengeance." In a remarkable and moving coup, the play's final lines, when Prospero normally addresses the audience, are delivered directly to Caliban: "As you from crimes would pardoned be/ Let your indulgence set me free." It cannot help but remind us of the birth of the new South Africa and the pressing need for reconciliation, truth and forgiveness.

But I'm in danger of making Janice Honeyman's production sound worthy when it actually boasts all the vitality and colour of Disney's great stage production of The Lion King (whose own plot, incidentally, was pinched from Hamlet). In Zulu tradition, the storm is conjured by a huge puppet serpent, the witch Sycorax is assembled before our eyes with a selection of outsized body parts, and the spirits of the island are dancers in ethnic costumes that seem to have been assembled by the Stratford Crochet and Macramé Society during a collective acid trip. The wedding masque is a riot of frenzied dance.

Illka Louw's design creates a beautiful sand-covered island dominated by the spreading branches of a great tree, and a thrilling percussive score is performed by on-stage musicians.

The performances are outstanding. Antony Sher's Prospero – plump, massively bearded and in serious need of an anger management course – brilliantly captures the emotional turbulence of the brooding magus as he attempts to put his injured life to rights. There is a great ache of love towards his daughter Miranda, real tenderness for Atandwa Kani's charismatic Ariel, and a scary violence in his dealings with both Caliban and the "men of sin" who did him out of his Dukedom.

His movement towards forgiveness is painful, slow and deeply affecting, while Sher's delivery of Prospero's great speech of renunciation, in which Shakespeare seems to be bidding farewell to his own art, sends shivers racing down the spine.

John Kani finds great dignity, as well as a festering sense of grievance, in Caliban, lending the role a tragic depth, and in her animal-skin outfit Tinarie Van Wyk Loots makes a fabulously sexy Miranda.

Magical, magnificent and deeply felt, this is not a Tempest to miss.