“It is the set that is the production’s most memorable aspect, however. Heaps of clothes lie strewn about the stage, here and there coalescing into great mounds, from which characters emerge, spirit-like. It is the world’s most disorganised jumble sale. Great lines of multi-coloured shirts are strung up above the performance, and as the play progresses, they are lifted and lowered, dancing and shimmying like washing lines flapping in a breeze.
Prior to the play’s denouement, Prospero delivers his famous meta-theatrical speech, reminding the audience that the actors ‘were all spirits, and are melted into air, into thin air’. Like Puck with his apologia at the end of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Prospero emphasises the fantasy, the ‘baseless fabric’, of the theatre. As characters seamlessly disappear into the rolling terrain of laundry behind him, Becs Andrews’ marvellous set becomes an arresting reflection of this fleeting, temporary quality of theatre. The ‘insubstantial pageant’ fades as quickly as it comes, and this truly is such stuff as dreams are made on.” Fergus Morgan
The Tempest / The Reviews Hub
Posted on 15 Dec 2015