The Tempest – Sam Wanamaker Playhouse

Writer: William Shakespeare

Director: Tim Crouch

The Tempest at the Sam Wanamaker Playhouse arrives as a playful, intelligent production that finds considerable pleasure in theatrical mischief. Directed by experimental theatre maker, Tim Crouch, this is a light-footed reading of Shakespeare’s late romance, alert to the comedy, absurdity and artifice that sit alongside its darker questions of power and control. The candlelit intimacy of the Wanamaker proves an ideal setting: close, conspiratorial, and well-suited to a production that frequently winks at its own mechanics.

The acting is consistently strong, with particular delight to be found in Sophie Steer’s Miranda. Steer plays her as a recognisably awkward teenager: socially uncertain, emotionally intense, and only half-aware of the forces shaping her life. It is a sharply observed performance, often very funny, and one that gives Miranda some of the production’s most memorable moments. That awkwardness, however, makes the character’s swift marriage to Ferdinand (Joshua Griffin) feel intentionally uncomfortable. Rather than smoothing over the play’s troubling romantic logic, the production allows that unease to linger, exposing the transactional nature of Prospero’s paternal authority. 

Crouch’s direction places its dramaturgy front and centre. Magic is not presented as seamless illusion but as something visibly made, negotiated and occasionally fragile. Scene changes, transformations and moments of wonder are deliberately exposed, sometimes confusingly, by the ensemble of characters rather than Prospero himself as a director-figure and godlike sorcerer.

But the play’s central concern with authorship and control remains clear. Power here is not innate, but performed. As Prospero, Tim Crouch offers a notably sadder interpretation than is often seen. This is a man who appears to be only just in control, clinging desperately to power he once had. The fragility of his authority gives the role an unexpected emotional weight, making this patriarch feel human and fallible.

The production’s most contentious choice lies in its handling of cultural and geographical identity. The island is an unstable composite space, populated by an eclectic mix of nationalities and accents: Italian characters spoken in British tones, an ambiguously pan-Pacific visual language applied to somewhere between Naples and Tangier, and heavily accented Spanish servants. Taken individually, these elements are theatrically persuasive, each earning its own suspension of disbelief. Together, however, they begin to blur the post-colonial argument that the production gestures towards. By layering multiple, loosely defined cultural references, the production risks flattening histories that carry very different political meanings. Rather than sharpening Prospero’s role as coloniser, the aesthetic collage can dilute the critique, rendering the island abstract where specificity might have strengthened the play’s politics.

The costumes and set (Rachana Jadhav) are beautifully made, drawing on a Polynesian-influenced steampunk aesthetic that feels both imaginative and practical. There is a real sense of craftsmanship in the detail, with garments and set pieces that are visually distinctive and others which crucially lack enough distinction to allow actors to blend easily into the crowd when required.

This rendition of The Tempest remains a confident and often delightful production whose pleasures lie in performance, intelligence and spectacle.

Runs until 12 April 2026