The Tempest: Taymor fails to conjure much of a storm

Sad news for Bard watchers: Julie Taymor's adaptation of William Shakespeare's The Tempest is not such stuff as dreams are made on.

Taymor, known for her lively theatrical production of The Lion King and the films Titus, Frida and Across the Universe, promised to bring something new to Shakespeare's island fantasy on the 400th anniversary of his farewell play. With a cast that includes Helen Mirren in the gender-adapted role of "Prospera" and an international ensemble including David Strathairn, Chris Cooper, Alfred Molina, Djimon Hounsou and Russell Brand, her new production comes with a tingle of high expectations.

The results are more like a lass and a lack. Apart from the cut-rate-looking computer-generated imagery and its Hawaiian setting, this Tempest is just another example of middling, muddled Shakespeare, a far less dynamic adaptation than Taymor managed in Titus, her 1999 version of Titus Andronicus.

Even the casting of the central character as a woman has little resonance. Mirren, wearing no makeup, dressed mostly in masculine clothes, proves as flinty as any wronged male ruler and as protective of her daughter's chastity. A scholar and master of magic, the former Duchess of Milan was cast out by usurpers, and has lived on her island for a dozen years with her now teenaged child, Miranda (Felicity Jones). Keeping them company are two indigenous slaves, the shape-shifting spirit Ariel (Ben Wishaw) and a mud-caked monster, Caliban (Hounsou).

As the story begins, Prospera conjures up a tempest, causing her old enemies to be shipwrecked on her island. One group of survivors includes Prospera's treacherous brother, Antonio (Cooper), King Alonso (Strathairn), the king's foppish brother, Sebastian (Alan Cumming), and the kindly windbag, Gonzalo (Tom Conti).

On another part of the island, Prospera and Ariel have fun tormenting a couple of drunken fools, Stephano and Trinculo (Molina and Brand) who fall in with the resentful Caliban. On a third front, Prospera arranges a romance between Miranda and the king's son, Ferdinand (Reeve Carney, currently starring in Taymor's Spider-Man musical on Broadway), another survivor of the shipwreck.

Back and forth we go, between the nobles, the low characters and back to Prospera delivering new orders to Ariel. The effect is disjointed, with a hodgepodge of visual ideas, which range from arresting - the black lava fields on the Hawaiian island of Lanai - to absurd. Skinny and white, Wishaw as Ariel looks like an early-seventies David Bowie, but taken one step further. His genitals have been CGI'd out and he has pubescent breasts that come and go as he flits around the screen like an overcaffeinated bat.

Other lapses include the fourth-act wedding masque where, instead of the spectacle of ancient pagan goddesses, we get what looks like a mildly dated planetarium show. A pack of dogs that Prospera conjures to torment the clown characters consists of plump Rottweilers with special-effects flames around their backsides.

All this might be easier to accept if the film re-awakened the play's language and theatrical themes, but the performances are simply too inconsistent to make it come alive. Most of the other actors fall below Mirren's standard. Strathairn and Cooper are earnest and decent, but caught in mid-Atlantic no-man's land. Hounsou's Caliban looks physically magnificent but tends to roar his speeches. As for the stunt casting of Russell Brand, he plays Russell Brand again, but it's less funny than usual.

Taymor takes a screenplay credit here for the cuts and minor changes but there's nothing revolutionary in her adaptation. The attention to the suppression of the women's knowledge is referred to but not developed. The decision to cast an African-born actor as Caliban conforms to more than a half-century of postcolonial interpretations of the play. Instead of conjuring up a new vision of The Tempest, Taymor seems to have taken the original and pasted on some distracting computer-generated glitter dust.

The Tempest