The mountain of overstuffed black bin bags, broken-down TVs and other detritus looks more post-apocalyptic junkyard than brave new world piled on to the set of Jemima Levick's revisitation of Shakespeare's island-bound epic.
Levick turns Shakespeare's world upside down even more by having the island populated solely by women. With Irene MacDougall's Prospero a steely matriarch in exile, Emily Winter's Ariel and Ann Louise Ross's Caliban are jump-suited prisoners in their own country who end up as surrogate daughters alongside Kirsty Mackay's initially tomboyish Miranda.
After the opening amplified bombast that shipwrecks the men from Milan on to Ti Green's set, what emerges is a serious and stately minded Tempest. With Prospero a single mum bringing up her Miranda without any paternal influence, by magicking her usurping brother Antonio, King Alonso and his son Ferdinand to her crumbling queendom, Prospero is not only reclaiming what's rightfully hers, but, like any mum, is making sure her little girl does alright.
Beyond Miranda, Levick's Tempest says even more about motherhood, whereby a fiercely protective Prospero must learn to let her disparate brood grow up and go out into a world where they can run wild and free beyond maternal constraints. In Miranda's case she does this by conjuring up archive video collages of other cultures beyond the island. While drunken sailors flail about like chat show era Olly Reed on a bender, Ariel and Caliban too have to be let off the leash.
If such an ambitious reading threatens to topple into itself at times, MacDougall anchors things with such a nuanced mix of dynamism and pathos that it's hard not to be moved by Prospero's plight in a richly realised production.
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