Reviews of The Tempest starring Sigourney Weaver at the Theatre Royal Drury Lane in London

"Sigourney weaves weird magic in West End debut"

"Inspired by the filmography of its Prospero, Sigourney Weaver, Jamie Lloyd’s production is audaciously odd – a sci-fi Shakespeare, or gestural Greek theatre in outer space"

"She [Sigourney Weaver] is certainly in alien territory here, and plays Prospero with the steely-voiced conviction of a commander giving urgent instruction to an interstellar space crew at imminent risk of attack."

"Weaver is not a masterful Prospero: her verse delivery is flat and featureless, which leaves a vacuum in this key role. But nuanced verse is spoken by Selina Cadell, who plays Prospero’s trusty councillor Gonzalo, and Jude Akuwudike as the King of Naples. Both show Weaver’s woodenness up by contrast. But the pay-off for Weaver’s (stunt?) casting is that her science-fiction back catalogue inspires the bigger concept of Lloyd’s production, with dazzling results."

"You might call it a space opera, for all its music and song. Or sci-fi Shakespeare, for its mix of poetry and next-level theatrical showmanship."

"Its detractors may call it an intergalactic failure, or make comparisons with Kenneth Branagh’s feverish King Lear from last year, which also had a planetary backdrop. This is not feverish in the least but it is outre, employing camp as a serious aesthetic choice."

"Lloyd does not eke out any deeper meanings from the text, but does present Prospero’s magical world with a stylised quality that carries touches of Peter Brook’s performance theatre and the avant-gardism of Lindsay Kemp."

"Haunting and magnificent"

"In a storm of her own making, Sigourney Weaver's Prospero commands the stage with a presence that is both serene and powerful, setting the tone for a mesmerizing performance."

"Lloyd’s vision is spectacular but spare; there are no fancy videos or techno clutter to distract from the performances or the story. But the sense of isolation and infinite space conveys a timelessness that is almost overwhelming."

"Weaver is a supremely confident presence, dressed in grey and white and delivering Prosero’s great speeches with a clarity of diction that is characteristic of the entire production. All the magic and enchantment emanates from Ariel and the non-binary Parks’ astonishing performance complements Weaver’s cool precision perfectly. Part Lady GaGa/part Peter Pan, their vocal range invests Ariel’s songs with an unprecedented beauty."

"... Weaver rises to the challenge of Shakespeare’s most autobiographical character. It’s a haunting, magnificent production that I will remember for a very long time."

"Sigourney Weaver in the West End is a thrill but the show fails to spark"

"Jamie Lloyd’s production has an incantatory, dream-like quality but instead of lightning in a bottle it’s a damp squib"

"Lloyd’s production has an incantatory, dream-like quality. The cast wear headset mics and speak the verse with great clarity but little passion, their movements stylised and stiff: on the first of two press nights, Weaver lost her words a couple of times. An interesting thematic suggestion that Prospero’s island is a place of rebirth gets lost amid the sonorous intonation and tedious comic relief. For all its stark visual boldness, this is a curiously old-fashioned take."

"Lloyd’s deployment of star actors and dramatic, tech-augmented visuals usually imbues the plays and musicals he reworks with an urgent lucidity. This show, short as it is, meanders and drags."

"Sorry to end the year on a ‘meh’ review. I write it with regret as an unashamed fan of both Weaver and Lloyd’s work. In the future I’ll be glad to say that I saw their Tempest. I just wish I could say it was better."

"Sigourney Weaver stars in a bleakly spectacular The Tempest"

"Production at London’s Theatre Royal, Drury Lane is visually striking but lacks emotional depth"

"We first see Sigourney Weaver’s Prospero sitting, meditatively, in a shaft of white light while behind her the vast stage of the Drury Lane Theatre submits to a raging storm of her own conjuring, all billowing blue silk, thunderous depths and blasts of lighting. It’s a dazzling opening to Jamie Lloyd’s staging of The Tempest, one that heralds this production’s striking use of the scope of the stage."

"And the production, though sadly undermined by its flaws, is bleakly spectacular (designed by Soutra Gilmour)."

"The approach honours the fascination in Shakespeare’s play with power — political, creative, magical, divine — and with theatre itself, embracing Drury Lane’s rich history. It speaks too to the island’s role as template: an arena where human beings try out authority"

"But what makes The Tempest such a great play is its emotional depth and wisdom... That human intricacy and intimacy often elude this staging. There’s a lack of jeopardy and it’s curiously unmoving, even at the highly charged reconciliation between Ferdinand (James Phoon) and his father Alonso (Jude Akuwudike), both of whom believe the other to be dead. The comic scenes, always tricky, feel particularly laboured."

"There’s fabulous work from Park as Ariel, an eerie, ethereal being with a superb singing voice, whose resentment at being enslaved burns across the stage. Selina Cadell brings warmth and humanity to the good courtier Gonzalo. And there’s a drive to revisit the play’s strangeness and teaching for our times. But overall, it feels like something gets lost at sea."

"Jamie Lloyd’s take on Shakespeare’s magical late play is stylish, but star Sigourney Weaver just isn’t up to the role of Prospero"

"... bagging the UK stage debut of movie icon Sigourney Weaver feels like a coup on paper, but maybe not so much in practice. She’s not embarrassingly bad or anything, but the role of exiled magician Prospero simply feels beyond her"

"Setting its star aside, Lloyd’s Tempest is an awesome spectacle, in which the island Prospero has been exiled to is represented by a hulking black hill, part industrial slag heap, part Denis Villeneuve's Dune."

"MVP of the whole thing is Mason Alexander Park’s bound spirit Aerial – a growlingly androgynous figure, they might be fey but radiate barely suppressed destructive energy."

"Elsewhere, newcomer Mara Huf is terrific as a growing voiced, sarcastic Miranda"

"In a play that has had a fair bit pruned to get it to a spare two hours 15 minute runtime, it feels like Lloyd has lavished a lot of time on the comedy subplot. The hijinks relating to the monstrous Caliban (depicted as a sort of grotesque overgrown baby by Forbes Masson) and the shipwrecked piss artists Stefano (Jasoin Barnett) and Trinculo (Matthew Horne) feels both overly prominent and somewhat generic"

"It looks awesome, and cues up Park and Huf as stars of the future. But it’s simply not very coherent and Weaver is just not up to the role she’s been saddled with. There’s magic here, but it all gets pretty rough at times."

"Shakespeare’s language seems alien to Sigourney Weaver"

"Making her West End debut as Prospero, the much-loved film star sadly fails to weave the requisite magic"

"The stark, sad fact, however, is that Weaver fails to weave the requisite magic. In terms of both her visual and auditory contribution, there’s something missing."

"There’s no staff for this self-made wizard to wield, though much woodenness in her delivery – an even-keel approach to the verse that verges on the automaton. When Prospero exclaims “I had forgot that foul conspiracy!”, well, I’ve heard people fret that they’ve left their washing out with more spontaneous angst."

"Oh, for a mellifluous touch of Johnny G in the night. Weaver’s monotony doesn’t sink the show but it causes it to list, and nothing can right it: not the gurning of Mathew Horne as clownish Trinculo, nor Mason Alexander Park as a wonderful, ethereal-voiced Ariel"

"The final moments do attain a due, touching note of forgiveness and reconciliation – but all that calm needs to follow a storm of vengeful emotion and psychological upset."

"This is a late masterpiece about betrayal and families, art and life, colonialism and the great transient globe itself. Lloyd has all this in his sights, but doesn’t fully make landfall."

"Tempest meets Alien... but Sigourney has no chance to weave her magic"

"A sad and cerebral figure wreaking revenge on the enemies who usurped her, Weaver instead brings her characteristic air."

"Yet Lloyd’s ruse of presenting her as a lone figure perched on a stool, orchestrating her revenge with the help of her spirit fixer Ariel, also isolates her from the rest of the cast. A virtual commentator on the action, her character is barely tested by other actors and her role becomes a recital. And, as usual, Lloyd’s production is a slave to the microphone. Following his recent Romeo and Juliet starring Tom Holland, his insistence on using mics not only makes everyone look like they’re lip-synching, it paradoxically renders some of the Bard’s finest verse in muttered whispers.?"

"If the complexities of the plot in which Prospero teaches her former rivals a lesson are lost in a pruned version of the text, the big gain is the enchantment of music composed by Ben and Max Ringham with Michael ‘Mikey J’ Asante."

"Even so, I’d like to have seen Weaver’s emotional range stretched a bit more than simply deploying her as an alpha-female observer on her own story. It’s a bit like renting a vintage Cadillac and using it for the weekly shop."

"Unearthly strangeness "

"Striking, austere visuals and star casting can’t bring heart to this cold and incoherent take on Shakespeare’s story of magic, legacy and forgiveness."

"... this sombre Tempest is alienating and coldly aloof. Relentlessly audacious director Jamie Lloyd deploys many of his signature techniques. There’s big-name casting – with Sigourney Weaver making her West End debut as Prospero. There’s also stark, stripped-back aesthetics, and a terse, unfussy minimalism to the performers’ delivery that builds an effectively eerie atmosphere, but leaves Shakespeare’s poetry feeling underserved, its meaning adrift."

"At the centre of this shifting world, Weaver’s Prospero is a faint, melancholy presence, her delivery flat and frequently tentative."

"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."

"Sigourney Weaver’s blank Prospero makes zero impression"

"The household robot Alexa could have breathed more life into the lines than the Hollywood star manages, heading a confusing show at the Theatre Royal Drury Lane"

"There’s a star-shaped hole at the centre of the first offering in director Jamie Lloyd’s Shakespeare mini-season at Drury Lane. While it’s good to see a VIP of Sigourney Weaver’s stature making her belated West End debut — the 75-year-old Hollywood actress is surely bringing in lots of people who haven’t bothered with iambic pentameters since they were at school — she turns in a strangely impersonal performance as Prospero, as if encountering the script for the first time. That all-around household helper, Alexa, could have breathed more life into the lines."

"Dressed down, like a crew member from Blake’s 7 hired on a minimum wage, this Prospero makes next to no impression at all."

"Mason Alexander Park’s Ariel, hoisted high over the stage, provides a rare burst of visual splendour. Otherwise, as the colours of the backdrop and Gilmour’s costumes are so muted, Lloyd’s vision of a magical kingdom soon grows monotonous. Confusing too: the heavily cut script, laced with surging, Hans Zimmer-like background music, gallops along at such a pace that newcomers are likely to struggle to decipher what exactly is going on as the various contingents mooch about the strange new land."

"A production stripped of poetry and wonder"

"His new production of The Tempest starring Sigourney Weaver as a female Prospero, feels almost wilfully misconceived and under-achieved. A play that cries out for rethinking has been slammed foursquare on the Theatre Royal Drury Lane’s stage and left in a void of interpretation."

"Mason Alexander Park’s Ariel (quite the best thing in the entire production) emerges out of blackness on wires in the air above, surrounded by yellow clouds, or sweeps across the dirt wrapped in a diaphanous veil, singing with an air of threat."

"No-one, apart from Selina Cadell who makes an honourable character of Gonzalo, one of the nobles of Milan that Prospero causes to be shipwrecked on the island, seems to have much idea about what they are saying. Weaver absolutely looks the part, commanding the stage with her charisma, brooding watchfully over the action, but she speaks in an unrelenting and perversely unrhythmic monotone."

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

"As Prospero, the ‘Alien’ star does not have the necessary charisma (or costume) to anchor this fanciful story"

"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."

"...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."

"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."

"Sigourney Weaver’s Prospero is all at sea in Jamie Lloyd’s overblown West End Shakespeare"

"The Tempest begins with a shipwreck and a hard-to-follow, panic-inducing speech. The scene could be a template for Jamie Lloyd’s production. It is hard to imagine a staging that mingles so much bombast with so much fog.

"The casting coup is Sigourney Weaver as Prospero. She is flat: not only unsure of her lines but apparently uncertain of what a line is, delivering phrases as if she were measuring portions on a plate, without a roll or much driving sense.

"No Shakespeare play is entirely dependent on its title character: the production could prosper without Prospero. Yet Lloyd – whose Cyrano gave me one of my best and swiftest theatrical evenings – has miasma-ed things up."

"The Tempest is dismal - and so is Sigourney Weaver"

"If this production at Theatre Royal Drury Lane is anything to go by, Jamie Lloyd's bag of tricks is getting worryingly empty"

"Unforgivably, this is theatre as those who don’t go dread that it will be."

"As for speaking her lines, the best one can say for Weaver is that she does. Her wooden delivery never wavers from a tone of blank meditation, and we are light years away from there being anything magical, mystical or magisterial about this Prospero."

"Kenneth Branagh’s bizarre Flintstones-era King Lear last year was a recent low point in celebrity Shakespeare outings but this is infinitely worse. Those unfamiliar with the play will be bamboozled from start to finish, such is the lack of clarity and conviction with which the narrative treated. Even I struggled to understand who everyone was initially – and this is my job."

"The Tempest contains some of the longest and least amusing drunk scenes in theatre history, but given that we are already out of our minds by this point they barely impact upon us."

"Weaver eventually shifts from sitting on a box to standing up. “Our revels now are ended” is a hauntingly beautiful line towards the end of The Tempest, but in this production the revels never even come close to starting."