The Tempest

Quite frankly, Le Mercury is screwed now.

The concept of an unpretentious French restaurant may seem an alien one, but Le Mercury is as close as it gets. Situated on Upper Street in Islington, North London, it does all the stuff you'd expect quickly and cheaply, providing you with a very respectable steak and chips for under a tenner. Best of all, it is - or rather, was - just over the road from the Almeida theatre, making it the ideal location for a pre-theatre nosh.

The Almeida Street building first opened in 1837 as the Islington Literary and Scientific Institution. Since then, it's been used as a music hall, a Salvation Army citadel and a factory for carnival novelties, before it was reconfigured for use as a 300-seat theatre in the 1980s. After a few years of fringe theatre obscurity, it was taken over in 1990 by joint Artistic Directors Ian McDiarmid and Jonathan Kent: the former an actor, the latter a director. (In case you're wondering where you've seen McDiarmid before, his best-known role is probably as the evil Palpatine in the Star Wars movies. He's totally unrecognisable under the makeup in Jedi, but he had a hefty presence in Phantom Menace - the title role, even - and looks set to have a lot more to do in the next two films.)

Over a period of ten years, the Almeida's management team have worked together to build it up from a small suburban fringe theatre to possibly the most important stage in the capital - everything the National Theatre should be, but almost invariably isn't. With a combination of classic revivals and new work, they made the theatre the place to be, and Spank's Pals have met up there on several occasions over the last decade. There was the spellbinding sight of Kevin Spacey letting rip in The Iceman Cometh - long before the West End picked up on the trick of using Hollywood stars to attract audiences, the Almeida was doing it and paying them the standard piss-poor Equity rate (around £250 a week) for the privilege. There were the frequent appearances of stars in the audience as well - I remember the performance of Beckett's Happy Days where Ralph Fiennes and Timothy Dalton were seen to exchange a surreptitious "ah, you're famous too" nod across the circle. There was the time when Spank's female Pals were stuck dumb by the appearance of Alan Rickman in the bar, looking for refreshment in the hour prior to his directorial debut, The Winter Guest. And they've even taken the show out beyond the environs of Islington for events such as 2000's Shakespeare In Shoreditch extravaganza.

So in that ten year period the Almeida has gone from strength to strength, and the ever-increasing audiences have frequently stopped off at Le Mercury for their pre- and post-theatre dining (mainly because in those ten years, the theatre itself could never get its own catering right). Life was good. Except that as of February 2001, they've closed the Almeida for eighteen months for much-needed major refurbishment.

Like I said: Le Mercury is screwed now.

The Tempest has got to be one of Shakespeare's battier plots, it's true. But as it's primarily concerned with the ending of things, it's been made to carry a lot of symbolic weight. In the last few years, we've had Peter Greenaway's visually stunning movie adaptation, Prospero's Books: it got a lot of its power from a sensational performance by John Gielgud, mainly because we all assumed this was going to be his last major role. (The twenty or so movies he did in the remaining ten years of his life proved us all wrong, of course.) More recently, Neil Gaiman's graphic novel The Sandman drew heavily on The Tempest in its final issue, as regular character William Shakespeare reflected on the nature of art and artists to wrap up the epic story. (If you're intrigued by the idea of a comic having William Shakespeare as a regular character, you really should track the series down.) And now, as the Almeida goes on a sabbatical, The Tempest has been chosen to close the theatre in its current form, directed by Kent and starring McDiarmid. Hence Spank and the Pals were there on Saturday February 17th 2001, the last night. I know this means that I'm reviewing a production and a theatre that you'll never see again, but indulge me here.

The first thing to hit you, as was the case with the Shoreditch Shakespeares, is the design. The Almeida's generally not the sort of theatre that puts visual style at a higher priority than the quality of acting, but you can imagine that the once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to cause actual structural damage to the theatre without permanent consequences must have been irresistable. So designer Paul Brown did what anyone in his position would have done: he flooded the stage. The performance area has been hollowed out and now consists of a huge pool of water, with two large island stages separated by a jumpable couple of feet. This means that they can go wild with the opening storm sequence: here it's represented by lone boatswain Ian Peck hanging from the ceiling on a rope ladder in semi-darkness, as several hundred gallons of water cascade onto him from a great height and crash onto the stage below, amid shouts and yells from his fellow travellers hanging from a rail at the back of the stage. (Those people who've done some serious pre-theatre drinking at Le Mercury are getting alarmed at this point, as this production's being performed in a single two-hour run without an interval, and there's a lot of running water on stage...)

Eventually the lights rise to reveal Prospero (Ian McDiarmid). He explains what's just transpired to his daughter Miranda (Anna Livia Ryan), while filling us in on important backstory in the process. Prospero was the former Duke of Milan: betrayed by his brother Antonio (Timothy Walker) and the King (Bruce Alexander), he has been deposed and sent to this island in exile, with only his daughter and his books of magic for company. Prospero has, in fact, been responsible for the storm we've just witnessed: and it has resulted in all his enemies being deposited on the island in a shipwreck. With the help of the other inhabitants of the island - the industrious spirit Ariel (Aidan Gillen) and the monstrous Caliban (Malcolm Storry), he sets out to make everything right again.

It's been a generally accepted truth (at least among Spank's Pals) that Ian McDiarmid is a much better actor than a director. Certainly the few times we've been disappointed at the Almeida have roughly coincided with when McDiarmid has been directing, while some of the best have involved him going splendidly over the top, most recently in a fabulous production of Marlowe's The Jew Of Malta. So it was a relief to hear that this final production would find both Artistic Directors playing to their natural strengths. Having said that, McDiarmid does have a tendency to go ape during the big dramatic scenes. His voice goes through all manner of bizarre changes: he starts off like Rowan Atkinson in Mr Bean mode, and spends much of the production lisping and gabbling as if he's left his false teeth backstage. As a result, he's caught on the cusp between emphasising what an unpleasant piece of work the vengeful Prospero is, and just being a shouty irritating git: however, this does make his change of heart towards the end of the play all the more emphatic and touching. Can I just mention here what a terrifyingly hairy back the man has, by the way?

The rest of the principals are a little patchy, unfortunately. Aidan Gillen as Ariel is the hardest working man in North London showbusiness: it's an incredibly demanding role in this production, as all his entrances involve either being lowered from the ceiling or rising up from under the water. However, Ariel is entrusted with the majority of the songs in the play: here, they're sung falsetto over a two-chord choral drone, and Gillen's voice isn't quite up to it, cracking badly on a number of occasions. Anna Livia Ryan plays Miranda as a bit too wet (ha!) and insipid: we don't believe in her wonder and delight when she encounters the King's son Ferdinand (Ifan Meredith), the first man she's ever seen apart from her father. Malcolm Storry's Caliban is probably the best of the bunch, achieving a careful balance between comedy and pathos: he gets a couple of splendidly played comic scenes with the two drunk servants Stephano (Alan David) and Trinculo (Adrian Scarborough). (The latter draws the short straw as being the only cast member who gets to fall off stage into the water, justifying the line "Monster, I do smell all horse-piss" later on.)

But as The Tempest is mainly about magic, it's only fitting that there are some fabulous visual coups on display here. Many of them are associated with Ariel, as he's the agent responsible for most of the supernatural acts on display. His first scene is inspired, as he does it hanging upside down from a rope, while his image is reflected the right way up in the water below. He frequently disappears underwater for minutes at a time, leading to the amusing sight of the audience craning forward to try and work out where he's gone. And his appearance as an avenging angel with black wings and a distorted voice is a wonder to behold. With all this, it's a shame that Kent couldn't find a way of making more of Prospero's final act of mercy of releasing Ariel from his service: it doesn't have the same emotional impact that, say, Peter Greenaway gave it in the final shot of Prospero's Books.

In an evening full of visual delights, there are a few others that come to mind. The wedding celebration looks pretty, but again is let down by the music, this time by a trio of boy sopranos (a selection of 3 from a possible 10 listed in the programme, another consequence of our ludicrous child labour laws). As with the Ariel songs, they're straining to reach the high notes all too often. More effectively, the whole thing is redeemed by Prospero's final appeal to the audience for their forgiveness for his actions, during which the house lights cunningly fade up. McDiarmid achieves real vulnerability in these last scenes, and the ovation he got was entirely justified. Curiously, on the final night there was no on-stage acknowledgement of the nature of the event: that was left to the audience, who kept applauding for a good five minutes after the lights went up before we got one final curtain call.

But this isn't the end of the Almeida, of course. They've already made plans to take over a temporary venue for the next year, in the unlikely environs of a former bus station in King's Cross. They start in March with Anna Friel in Franz Wedekind's Lulu (good choice for King's Cross), with a Neil LaBute premiere to follow shortly afterwards. There's no reason to assume that their commitment to great theatre both old and new won't go on for decades to come. And Le Mercury? I'd like to think that their commitment to decent steak and chips will go on regardless. Being a monkey, and all.

Links

The Almeida's official site is a little out of date right now, telling you mainly about the season that's just finished with The Tempest. But they should soon have details of the forthcoming King's Cross productions, and they'll certainly tell you when the newly refurbished theatre is back for your enjoyment some time in Autumn 2002.

The Complete Works Of William Shakespeare are available on the web for your free perusal. The Tempest is obviously one of them.

The Architecture Association's site contains a number of pieces of student diploma work. One of them, crowdspaceportrait, is a photographic study of four public spaces, including the Almeida Theatre. I stole Seijiro Hayashi's shot of the Almeida foyer from here for use above, so it's only fair that I give them a credit.

Streetsensation provides panoramic views of London's best streets, including Upper Street in Islington (if you're curious to see what the front of Le Mercury looks like).

Star Wars has been good to Ian McDiarmid, and it's only right that the official site has a page about Palpatine. (By the way, can I take this opportunity to state my theory that Palpatine is secretly the father of Anakin Skywalker, and all this 'he has no father, I can't explain it' nonsense has nothing to do with virgin births at all? Therefore making the final Palpatine/Vader/Luke conflict in Return Of The Jedi a scrap between three generations of the same family? You watch for Episodes 2 and 3, see if I'm right.)

The Sidious-Palpatine Estrogen Brigade is the scarier end of Star Wars fandom: a site run by girlies who think that Ian McDiarmid's character is sex on a stick. There's even a section featuring semi-pornographic fan fiction involving the character. ("There are always two, a master and an apprentice," says Palpatine as he's sodomising Darth Maul.) Ewwwww! Girls! His hairy back!

February 24th 2001