[In the following excerpted review, Smallwood calls Jude Kelly's 1999 production of The Tempest at the West Yorkshire Playhouse “deeply disappointing” save for Sir Ian McKellen's mesmerizing Prospero.]

From The Winter's Tale to The Tempest is not a long step in most chronological lists of Shakespeare's plays, but the symbolic significance of Sir Ian McKellen's journey from London to Leeds to play in a repertory season at the West Yorkshire Playhouse that included Prospero in a production of The Tempest directed by Jude Kelly was much commented upon by reviewers. The play was offered in a grim and ugly prison-cell set by Robert Innes Hopkins, draped at the back with polythene sheeting, chains hanging from walls decorated with a daily chalk-mark to record the long months and years of Prospero's exile, piles of logs on either side, pieces of polythene strewn around, a few battered buckets, a circle of large boulders, and, centre-stage, a decayed old sofa. Since the sound-effects of wind and storm were nothing if not realistic, the requirement seemed to be that we take these visual objects at face value too, the miserable flotsam of a tide-washed island, though the polythene, it seemed (an awkward duality), had intermittently symbolic properties too, for of it Prospero's magic garment was made, from it Ariel appeared, in it Prospero became invisible, from within cones of it the goddesses spoke their amplified whispered blessings in the masque, and by its allure on Prospero's clothes-line we had to suppose that Stephano and company were diverted from their murderous purpose. The Chekhov and Coward of the rest of the company's repertoire meant that the trio of men of sin had to be played by women hardly old enough to have been actively wicked twelve years earlier, while their ‘Burlington Bertie’ appearance in tailcoats, and their tendency to strut and swagger like Portia practising to Nerissa for her courtroom performance, robbed all their scenes of credibility and left a terrible gap in the production where the opposition to Prospero should have been. The comic scenes went for little too, though Will Keen worked hard at his wistful little stand-up Ulster comedian Trinculo.

It was, however, Sir Ian's Prospero that one had come to see. Onto the stage he shuffled as the performance began, slightly unsteady on his pins, in his battered straw hat, ragged trousers that finished half way down very white calves, ancient brogues, and moth-eaten cardigan, chuntering to himself as he inscribed this day's chalk-mark on the wall and, putting on the long polythene stole that represented Prospero's magic cloak (kissing it like a priest as he did so) and opening an ancient volume taped up against final disintegration, lit a little night-light within each of the boulders. Then he threw a toy boat into one of the buckets, began clicking a split bamboo cane over a little collection of not-very-voodooish woollen dolls, and lay back on the sofa and waited for the storm to begin. The words of the shipwreck scene were more or less inaudible for the overwhelmingly realistic sound effects, but its action was not uninterestingly eerie in a strange blue light behind the upstage polythene sheets.

Although the production as a whole was deeply disappointing, at its centre was an eccentric but fascinating reading of its principal role. McKellen presented a profoundly weary, disillusioned Prospero, crotchety and aloof and slightly dotty, though with a touching, gruff affection for his daughter. There was never any urgency about this Prospero's behaviour: it was as if he had always known that he would one day gain vengeance over Antonio and the process of achieving it was tiring and depressing. He had a habit of flapping his arms in an uncoordinated way, as though undecided about how to proceed. Anger could still be stirred in him as he remembered past wrongs, but there was never any sense of struggle to find the ability to overcome it; to punish his enemies really wasn't worth it, for they would never learn, and, anyway, was his own earlier behaviour really beyond reproach? There were little surges of hard-won energy here and there, glimpses of approval for Paul Bhattacharjee's notably unrebellious Ariel (all in blue paint), wry half-smiles at the eagerness of Claudie Blakley's spirited if rather vulgar little Miranda, assertions of power over Timothy Walker's absurdly fang-toothed Caliban and Rhashan Stone's finely spoken Ferdinand that involved a certain amount of grim (or mock-grim) jangling of the keys which he carried to their fetters. This last, and the fact that he had Ariel and Caliban dressed in replicas of his own hat and cardigan (Caliban threw his off in glee as he subjugated himself to Stephano), were the only gestures in the direction of the recently fashionable colonial-oppressor version of Prospero. Weary old fuddy-duddy, his old brain more or less permanently troubled, was what we were mostly offered here—along with a virtuoso command of Shakespearian verse-speaking.

This was a Prospero one couldn't stop listening to—partly because some of the phrasing was so wilful that total attention was essential to stay abreast of meaning. But the sudden little spurts, the musicality with which certain phrases were slowed or speeded, language orchestrated as much as spoken, the apparent throwaway nonchalance that was in fact so precisely calculated, the mixture of the conversational and the majestic, the sheer bravura brilliance of technique unashamedly on display, were a constant source of fascination. There was a sense of bleak pathos, even doom, about ‘Our revels now are ended’, a detached resignation to loneliness and to every third thought being his grave which appeared again, with a lingering over the phrasing that gave an even deeper sense of world-weariness to ‘Ye elves of brooks …’. And at the end, after his amusement at the bewilderment of the lords of Naples and Milan and their rather indecisive dismissal (had they learned anything or not?), and after a semi-affectionate pat on the head for a penitent Caliban, and with the magic polythene stole and the bamboo wand safely dispatched down the trapdoor, it was as if a weight had been lifted from him, physically and vocally, and the Epilogue had a remarkably exhilarating directness, and simplicity, and freedom, that provided a genuine climax to the piece, a Prospero earnestly begging for the audience's attention, rather than the dying fall that is one's usual theatrical experience. One had travelled to Leeds to hear a star actor speak Shakespeare and the surprises were worth the journey. Nothing else in the production was.