The Tempest review — Prospero magic holds long show together

★★★☆☆
Shakespeare’s farewell from solo playwriting is, as the classical scholars don’t quite say, an all-you-can-eat-buffet of the bizarre. So it falls on whoever plays Prospero, the exiled duke who takes on magus-like powers when stranded on a tropical island, to bind together all those dishes. To exude the eccentric and the imposing, the fantastical and the earthy, the cosseting and the coercive. Easy.

Well, Elizabeth Freestone’s production may veer between the inspired and the rather clunky, but her star, Alex Kingston, the English actress who made it big in American in ER and big in time and space in Doctor Who, knows how to own that stage. And that island.

Her Prospero pads undetected through the deck of the soon-to-be wrecked ship at