PATRICK MARMION reviews The Tempest: Tempest meets Alien... but Sigourney has no chance to weave her magic
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Theatre Royal Drury Lane, London. Rating:. Great excitement this week as Hollywood veteran Sigourney Weaver teleported into London to make her long-overdue West End debut. And what could be more a more fitting challenge for her than a sci-fi version of Shakespeare’s late play, The Tempest?.
![[Sigourney Weaver teleported into London to make her long-overdue West End debut]](https://i.dailymail.co.uk/1s/2024/12/20/00/93338085-14212015-image-a-14_1734653063662.jpg)
The versatile American actress is known for many hugely different films - from Working Girl to Gorillas In The Mist and The Ice Storm. But none live longer or more alarmingly in the memory than her part in Ridley Scott’s Alien franchise. In The Tempest she takes on the role of Prospero, conventionally played by a man but which works perfectly with Weaver as a former female ‘Duke’ of Milan who has been deposed and shipwrecked on a desert island. Only here, in Jamie Lloyd’s latest celebrity reboot, it’s as if that desert island is a distant planet which Prospero rules as a magician.
![[The play is a reimagined sci-fi version of Shakespeare’s late play, The Tempest]](https://i.dailymail.co.uk/1s/2024/12/20/00/93338081-14212015-image-a-15_1734653074161.jpg)
Happily, Shakespeare spares the 75-year-old actress the horrors of grappling with an intergalactic man-eating parasite. A sad and cerebral figure wreaking revenge on the enemies who usurped her, Weaver instead brings her characteristic air. The nut-brown bob that hasn’t changed in half a century (bar the head shave for Alien 3 circa 1992) and that kind, but slightly disappointed, Reverend Mother smile.
![[Patrick Marimon: The set is out of this world, like a Star Trek studio from the 1960s]](https://i.dailymail.co.uk/1s/2024/12/20/00/93338077-14212015-image-a-16_1734653105202.jpg)
Yet Lloyd’s ruse of presenting her as a lone figure perched on a stool, orchestrating her revenge with the help of her spirit fixer Ariel, also isolates her from the rest of the cast. A virtual commentator on the action, her character is barely tested by other actors and her role becomes a recital.
