Review: The Tempest, Golden Hinde ★★★★

An historical nautical setting is currently playing host to Shakespeare’s The Tempest as part of the Totally Thames Festival. Backed by Elizabeth I, Sir Francis Drake circumnavigated the globe aboard the original Golden Hinde from 1577 – 1580, around ten years before Shakespeare was establishing his career and thirty years before the Tempest was written.

Built using 16th-century shipbuilding techniques and materials, the current Golden Hinde replica now standing just down river from Shakespeare’s Globe was built in 1973 and serves as a museum and education venue.

This September, the atmospheric historic vessel is a fitting home for Rebekah King’s adaptation of Shakespeare’s Tempest which has been prepared as a site-specific production using many spaces both inside and on top of the boat – transforming it into Prospero’s island and intimately immersing audiences in the story.

As an historic boat, this is a show for those with good mobility, comfy shoes and enough spatial awareness to keep their heads safe moving round small and uneven spaces. Audiences also need to sit on the floor at certain points, sometimes nestled amongst the ship’s equipment. It’s great fun and everyone in the audience was patient and cooperative with those (like me) who wanted to take their time on some of the trickier stairs and spaces. It was a very special experience to be given the run of such a significant vessel and its wooden ambience added a sense of other-worldliness to the play.

The show is trimmed to fit a one-hour run time and uses six actors in multiple roles. Prose has been effectively added to make Ariel (Cassandra Wilson) the storyteller who helps the audience to navigate where they should be on board. This mostly worked well though she did have to redirect us when we all crowded mistakenly into Prospero’s room and an audience member made off with a prop barrel to sit on and had to be persuaded to give it back!

A simple May Day-style floral headdress denotes when Cassandra Wilson is playing Miranda instead, but her movements and voice are also clearly delineated. Ariel is balletic in her movements whereas Miranda has more of the firmness of a petulant teen with her father and then an ingenue-like new love when she meets Ferdinand.

Zoé Badovinac serves as an intensely noble Prospero and also plays Antonio with another simple costume change. However, one small issue with the boat setting is that various beams and walls could sometimes obscure the actors and, if one did not know the plot already, it might be harder to know who was talking to whom as they switch characters.

There are two scenes that are run simultaneously and then swapped. This pleasingly adds to the intimacy, as half the audience – in a smaller space – watch Miranda fall in love with Ferdinand (Charlie Woodward). Meanwhile, outside on the top deck, the famous comedy scene where Trinculo (Oliver George Wood) hides with Caliban (a very lithe Hadrian Conyngham) and a drunken Stephano (an amusingly slurred Lauren Grierson) comes across them. Unfortunately, comic drunken meetings are louder than romantic meetings and Miranda and Ferdinand’s get-together inside plays out with “What to do with the drunken sailor” wafting through the walls from Stephano outdoors. On a busy island, things may well happen at the same time in this way, but it did make it slightly harder to hear.

In general though, the cast are all very articulate and the spoken lines are clear and well performed. Some background boat noise that played in scenes on the lower decks was slightly louder than I would have preferred compared to the actor’s speech but their words were never lost.

Running from Gloucestershire and on out to sea, the Thames has long been the lifeblood of London. The Golden Hinde is a window into its history and a play written in the same era as that original boat makes for a genuine celebration of the boat, the area and the words of Shakespeare. This is the Totally Thames Festival doing exactly what it’s meant to: reminding us of the river’s history, importance and culture.

[Thank you to Chloe Nelkin for a gifted ticket for an honest review.]

Images: Julian Guidera

The Tempest returns as part of the Totally Thames Festival on 22nd September.

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