Novello, WC2

Shakespeare’s enchanted isle is a terrifying frozen wasteland in Rupert Goold’s wildly imaginative RSC production, first seen in Stratford last summer.

There’s a touch of Joseph Beuys to the aesthetic: this is a place of driving snow and fur-hooded nomadic spirits, of shamanic ritual, of bones, blood and blubber. Giles Cadle’s designs have the jagged elemental quality of a Beuys sculpture — but he and Goold lash the harsh power of their icy wilderness to a lush theatricality.

The opening, in which we hear an ominous shipping forecast and glimpse the tempest-tossed courtiers through a porthole, is wonderfully inventive. Curtains, on which are superimposed images of foaming seas, divide the play’s scenes; and the existential anguish, bleak humour and deep compassion of Beckett inform its relationships.

The ruler of this inhospitable realm is Patrick Stewart’s mesmerising Prospero, whose “magic garment” is here animal skins and a reindeer skull. Stewart gives a rivetingly complex performance. Recalling his usurpation from the dukedom of Milan by his brother, Antonio, and his conspirators, he trembles with impotent rage almost like Lear. He is an intensely touching father who, dabbing a moistened handkerchief to the cheek of his daughter, Mariah Gale’s witty, wondering Miranda, tenderly prepares her for her first encounter with Ferdinand.

He is also despotic, and capable of childish spite, gleefully spitting into Caliban’s food bowl. Finally, as he flings his staff into the burning wreck of his log-cabin home, constructed from the timbers of foundered ships, he is desperately moving. He throws himself upon the mercy of us, his audience, renouncing the sorcery that protects him in exchange for redemption and a harmonious future that, to judge by the chilling refusal of Ken Bones’s Antonio to offer any gesture of reconciliation, may never be his.

There is nothing simple, either, about this Prospero’s connection to those he subjugates. Julian Bleach’s vampiric Ariel, his face like a death’s head and his voice like ground glass, emerges, Endgame -style, from a dustbin, and there are echoes of Hamm and Clov in the mutual dependency between the spirit and the sorcerer. When Ariel is at last freed, there’s pain as well as release in Bleach’s inarticulate cry. John Light’s Caliban ( pictured with Stewart ) is a dignified, cruelly abused Lucky-like figure, dragged about at the end of a rope.

The production as a whole is a serious enchantment, as capable of warming the heart and the intellect as of freezing the marrow.

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