Shakespeare for the Jung

I have never been so flummoxed by a Shakespeare production in my life. This version of The Tempest, performed by three actors in Jacobean costumes, with bejeaned, female dancers in leather jackets, six singers and a dangling rope, tries to integrate analytical psychology, Renaissance Philosophy and pantomime knockabout.

These elements mix about as well as chalk and beer. According to Mark Rylance, who plays Prospero, Alonso and that drunken butler, Stephano, the production has been inspired by Carl Jung's psychological interpretation of alchemy. This is not quite as intimidating as it sounds, though five pages in the programme are taken up with explaining the Jung approach.

Director Tim Carroll, who contributes his own interesting psychological gloss, explains the concept: Prospero, in crisis because of over-reliance on intellect and imagination, as incarnated by spiritual Ariel, and fear of his repressed, shadow persona, represented by earthy, sexy Caliban, suffers The Tempest of breakdown.

The island becomes his interior mindscape, the place for therapy where he will reconcile the Ariel and Caliban elements of his pysche by respectively freeing the former and accepting the latter.

No wonder, then, that the opening scene reveals Rylance's Prospero holding a chess-board aloft and excitedly simulating the storm that will bring his shipwrecked enemies to the island, like some boy actor in a world of his own. My bemusement, though, concerns Carroll's failure to apply his fascinating Jungian theories to the actual production, at least in theatrical terms that can be easily grasped.

Anyone not familiar with the play will often be hard-pressed to understand what is going on. With three performers taking all the parts, confusion looms. Rylance plays the deposed Duke of Milan as if sunk in a trance of melancholia from which he is roused to gloomy resentment, his voice almost invariably trapped in an uninflected low register.

f simmering rage there is scarcely a sign and his journey towards spiritual awareness - or should it be integration? - is such a VIP one that it goes with dull, unruffled smoothness. His pompously drunk Stephano is stamped with far more conviction.

Edward Hogg's solid, northern Ariel and Alex Hassell's well-dressed Caliban seem quite out of place. That dangling rope, those weirdly gesticulating dancers serve as futher metaphors in a production that sadly vanishes up its own concept.

Until 2 October. Information: 020 7401 9919.

The Tempest