Sigourney Weaver flails in an odd and narratively unclear take on The Tempest

After sending hit after hit sailing into a grateful West End, the good ship Jamie Lloyd has finally foundered with this curious take on Shakespeare’s late play. All of the superstar director’s hallmarks are here: a moody monochrome palette; a spectacularly ballsy concept; a striking bit of “how much did they pay her?” celeb casting in the form of Alien star Sigourney Weaver. But although turning The Tempest into a space age queer utopia is a promising idea, this production doesn’t deliver the goods.

Plenty of Weaver’s fans will be making their first voyage to the unknown territory of theatre, so Lloyd makes them at home with an island setting that’s got the fuzzy, rock-strewn darkness of retro sci fi movies. Designer Soutra Gilmour crafts a vast sail of silk that billows above the stage, enveloping – and unfortunately upstaging – Weaver’s gender-swapped magician Prospero, supposed master of this storm.

She opens sitting centre stage, alternately stumbling over and rattling through her lines as she faces straight out at the audience with the grim visage of Anne Boleyn eyeing the chopping block. It’s stressful to watch, but things do improve. When shipwrecked nobles land on the island, Weaver finds her confidence, introducing these new arrivals to her daughter Miranda (Mara Huf) with the steely precision of Ripley describing alien lifeforms. Still, she doesn’t have the charisma to anchor this fanciful story, and she’s not helped by a stripped-back costume design that gives her an odd little padded jerkin instead of Prospero’s usual grand robe and staff.

Instead, all this production’s magic is bestowed on Prospero’s spirit helper Ariel. Played by Mason Alexander Park, Ariel feels like an unjustly forgotten Eighties goth icon, with their icy Bauhaus vocals melting into chilling falsetto as they soar through the air in leather corsetry and jet black feathers. The dark aesthetic continues with Caliban: it’s a relief to dodge the usual awkwardness of this slave character by making him into a white bondage fiend who trembles with salacious delight when Prospero threatens to pinch him. This island feels like a queer fetish club at 4am, where time stands still and secret goings on are communicated in crackling ASMR hisses (unless, more prosaically, Weaver has ill-fitting dentures and the rest of the cast are beginning to lisp in subconscious solidarity).

Lloyd pares away at the text for a lightning fast runtime of under two hours (not including interval), but his choices feel odd and narratively unclear. In such a sexually open, futuristic world, why is Prospero still so obsessed with the status of her daughter’s hymen? The story’s subplot usually brings some humour to this stately play, but it’s limp and baffling here, even though Jason Barnett wrings some fun out of his lines as Stephano, vamping for the crowd with his London-accented “Is it!”.

Futuristic though it might feel, there’s something very old school about this take on The Tempest. Its cast moves with studied mannerisms along ritualistic lines ordained by movement director Fabian Aloise. Its bluster and high spectacle would be recognisable to the Regency audiences of Theatre Royal Drury Lane, even if its alien landscapes would not. But all this elaborate grandeur weighs heavily on the shoulders of a star who’s not strong enough to support it, overwhelming a story that’s lost its old magic in the telling.

‘The Tempest’ is on at Theatre Royal Drury Lane until 1 February 2024