The enchanted isle is a cheerless room, its three doors flapping in the howling wind.
Prospero, gaunt and grizzled in braces and shirtsleeves, is given to bluster and bullying, and seeks to control a semi-feral Miranda with blows and caresses. Declan Donnellan’s production for Cheek by Jowl’s Russian ensemble is characteristically rich: moments of exquisite lyricism elide with anguish and violence, amid evocations of communism and contemporary consumerism.
The staging, mesmerisingly performed in Russian with surtitles, is fluid, conveying the viewer through the action with tidal force. Water is everywhere. It bursts through the doorways of Nick Ormerod’s set, drenching the mariners aboard their foundering ship. It’s poured with amused malice by a black-suited, barefoot, pale Ariel and his identically clad attendant spirits from a watering can on to the head of a shivering, comically camp Trinculo. And it’s used by Prospero to bathe first the wayward Miranda, and later Ferdinand, after he has been beaten and worked to the point of collapse.
As the island’s tottering despot, Igor Yasulovich is engrossing. His efforts to tame Miranda (Anya Khalilulina) are an unsettling blend of paternal care and brutality. She repeatedly rebels, stripping away her clothes to wash before the abused Caliban (Alexander Feklistov), with whom she enjoys a touching closeness. On first seeing Ferdinand, she bites him before exploring his body with hungry sensuality. And when Prospero fastens a string of pearls around her neck, she struggles as though it were a yoke.
The political implications crystallise when the masque is danced by peasants carrying sheaves of wheat or sickles, accompanied by projected images from a Soviet propaganda film. And when Trinculo, Stephano and Caliban raid Prospero’s cave, they stumble into a designer boutique, equipped with credit cards. The final image, as Caliban and Ariel win their freedom, is equivocal: the distressed Miranda is dragged away, screaming, to her “brave new world”, while the two remaining islanders gaze at one another, lost. It’s an astute and absorbing vision of cruelty and compassion.
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Box office: 01865 305305, to March 21, then touring to April 16