Missing the magic

It is a long time since I saw a more overrated Shakespearian production than this small, subdued storm of a Tempest, which Michael Grandage disappointingly directs.

Most, though not all my colleagues mysteriously raved about Grandage's unimaginative, ill-formed production and the snarling artificialities of Sir Derek Jacobi's meagre, magic-free Prospero when it premiered at Sheffield's Crucible Theatre last October.

Perhaps something went wrong on the journey into town. But I suspect that the problem has to do with Grandage's trite concept and Sir Derek's precious, antique style of Shakespearian declaiming, which plenty adore and I abhor.

Grandage's familiar idea is to make this Tempest a play within a play. No allusions to the crucial themes of colonial exploitation occur. Prospero becomes a master of ceremonies, magically dreaming up his own theatre in which he plays out a fantasy of revenge and forgiveness.

Perhaps it could be magical if Grandage had not let his scheme petrify in embryonic form. It begins arrestingly. Despite realistic blasts of thunder that launch this Tempest there's eerie calm on board the dry, flailing ship - as if it were all a dream. A back curtain falls to reveal Prospero's cell, in the midst of designer Christopher Oram's crumbling, inner proscenium.

Sir Derek's white-bearded Prospero, who dispenses with a colourful hippy cloak to reveal he's wearing cream slacks, green waistcoat and floppy shirt, looks less a vengeful magician or Island despot than an incongruous male model advertising the latest line in John Lewis's holiday wear for the fashionable, older man. Jacobi doesn't chart Prospero's spiritual journey from rage to ambivalent serenity and forgiveness. Instead he maintains an air of frigid

His biliousness becomes pervasive. It reaches Claire Prices's over-mature Miranda, Louis Hilyer's Caliban, who's blandly humanised as a muddy island reveller, and the Royal Party, led by Robert East's impressive, grief-struck monarch.

At least Nigel Lindsay's pompous, drink-crazy butler, Stephano, brings flashes of comic relief. Grandage's only novel touches are either camply irrelevant or tentative: the goddesses appear as transvestite youths. Daniel Evans's shaven-headed, eloquent Ariel, bare-torsoed in green skirt or masquerading as a butterfly with two young male spirits in attendance, sings and flits lightly around in gay abandon. Some unenchanted evening.

Until 15 March. Box office: 020 7369 1722.

The Tempest