The RSC's South African Tempest

The back of the upper circle in the Richmond Theatre probably wasn’t the best vantage point for seeing this play, but I was lucky to get the last two tickets and I’m certainly not complaining.  It’s an old-fashioned proscenium theatre built a century or so ago, designed by Frank Matcham, and very similar to the London Coliseum, though smaller.  This exciting Royal Shakespeare Company production from the Baxter Theatre in Johannesburg featuring South African-born Antony Sher as Prospero and John Kani as Caliban has already been to Stratford , and will also be seen in Leeds, Bath, Nottingham and Sheffield.  The proscenium arch in Richmond isn’t ideal, but Janice Honeyman’s production is absolutely mesmerising, and not just because of the two legendary actors appearing together for the first time.   Honeyman (a schoolfriend of Sher) teases out the colonial subtext of the play by making it African rather than specifically South African.  The stunning use of costume, masks and puppets conjures up a spirit world colliding with European colonialism at its apogee, symbolised by the Victorian colonial dress of the shipwrecked party.  Sher’s Prospero is no dreamy magician but a brutal tyrant (as Caliban calls him) whose weapons of dominance are guns and chains and a staff that is more of a cudgel than a wand.  The casting of the grey-haired veteran Kani as the ‘monster’ Caliban has an extra resonance, and the play’s multiple meanings emerge very clearly in the final scenes. Prospero is a colonial figure who has ‘gone native’, like Kurtz in Conrad’s Heart of Darkness.  He wears a shabby shaman’s cloak to hide his shabby and stained white linen suit.  Miranda, dressed in rags, crouches and scuttles around the stage like a girl who has slipped outside the European colonial realm and is only at home in her father’s savage island kingdom. When Prospero sets Ariel free and casts aside his magic powers, Sher conveys the sense of a man renouncing his violent instincts.  Instead of a staff, he walks off stage with an old leather suitcase and an umbrella.  At the same time Caliban, who has spent the entire play leaning forward on two sticks, casts them aside and raises himself to his full height and dignity.  It’s a marvellous moment which suggests that the abusive colonial experience makes victims of all of us, and only when we learn to overcome it can we discover our true selves.  This subtle interpretation of the play isn’t narrowly political, and it works brilliantly.  Kani has a Mandela-like quality which is enhanced for me by my vivid memories of seeing him on stage in London

a few years ago in Athol Fugard’s The Island.  His use of the two sticks conjures up another memory of a performance that I never actually saw but is nonetheless etched somewhere in my subconscious – Antony Sher’s Richard III on crutches. Ariel (Atandtwa Kani) gives a memorable performance, and I also liked Tinarie van Wyk Loots as Miranda.  The design by Illka Louw and the puppetry by Janni Younge are extraordinary.