The week in theatre: The Tempest; Natasha, Pierre & the Great Comet of 1812; You Me Bum Bum Train – review

The Tempest begins with a shipwreck and a hard-to-follow, panic-inducing speech. The scene could be a template for Jamie Lloyd’s production. It is hard to imagine a staging that mingles so much bombast with so much fog.

The casting coup is Sigourney Weaver as Prospero. She is flat: not only unsure of her lines but apparently uncertain of what a line is, delivering phrases as if she were measuring portions on a plate, without a roll or much driving sense.

No Shakespeare play is entirely dependent on its title character: the production could prosper without Prospero. Yet Lloyd – whose Cyrano gave me one of my best and swiftest theatrical evenings – has miasma-ed things up.

Everyone is miked and the amplification is so enormous that it is often not only hard to catch the words but to know who is speaking them. Mara Huf’s Miranda is gruff; Mason Alexander Park’s overdressed Ariel belongs more to earth than air. Soutra Gilmour’s parched black island – somewhere between Lanzarote and a coal tip – is bathed by Jon Clark’s lighting in a pea-souper. Hard to imagine a brave new world.

Jude Akuwudike is crisp as Alonso. Forbes Masson’s Caliban is accomplished: wrestler-like and strongly spoken. Yet the supposedly comic (it is not funny) scene in which he becomes entwined with Trinculo, appearing as a four-legged monster, is made nonsensical as the chaps clamber over each other, making an accident into an intention.

The true light here is Selina Cadell as Gonzalo. She declares “few in millions can speak like us”: if only it were otherwise. Her easy authority is exemplary. She makes the speech about a just and equal commonwealth seem the play’s centrepiece, and salvages an important dramatic thread. What is missing elsewhere is the sense of dream, the ethereal, the fade and glimmer of the verse. It is one thing to banish magic; another to make Shakespeare’s words on evanescence seem so merely pedestrian.

It could scarcely be more unlikely. It could scarcely be more vivid. Dave Malloy’s Natasha, Pierre & the Great Comet of 1812 takes a small slice, some 70 pages, of War and Peace and sets them to rock, klezmer, folk song and a few (for once, not too many) ballads. The result – aswirl with colour and movement, alive with decisive characterisation and rending story – brings strong new flavours to the stage.

A fall from grace, a stirring of hope and love. Natasha, the vivacious beauty who has only ever been adored, turns from her suitor, away at the war, to elope with a gorgeous ne’er-do-well. Chumisa Dornford-May – megawatt voice and smile bursting from her sugary pink flounced frock – is beautifully balanced by the assurance of Maimuna Memon as her cousin Sonia, resolute in Dr Martens. Crumpled and yearning, Declan Bennett’s fine, complicated Pierre circles the action, looking up at the stars.

First seen off Broadway in 2012, the show is now set alight by director Tim Sheader, the new Donmar head, who made Regent’s Park alive with the sound of musicals. It teems with rarities. Even the narrative is sung: Nastasha describes herself blushing. A greater than usual number of low but aspiring voices send a Slavic rumble through the action: Cat Simmons’s dangerous sophisticate has bewitching mellow tones. With cello, clarinet and (hurrah) an accordion that is plaintive not bouncy, the sheer variety of rhythm is invigorating, inflecting. A snappy opening chorus instructs the audience to look in their programmes if they want a who’s who, but meanwhile offers clues: “Anatole is hot”. An unusual reflective number about friendship between women soars as a ballad. In despair, the music becomes an expiring sigh, like a mechanism creaking to its end.

A memory of old Russia is supplied by the waltzing figures of a soldier and his bride, who appear intermittently, masked and stiff like wooden dolls or skittles. Elsewhere – helped by costume designer Evie Gurney’s wild leather and lace and tartan and purple fur – the 21st century dances seductively with the 19th. The monumental seen in miniature.

There is nothing like the first experience of going to – being swept up by – You Me Bum Bum Train. No point in trying to parse the title; difficult to put in order the rush of sensations; hard to believe afterwards that it actually happened. Everyone is asked to keep mum about what goes on in the corridors and rooms that uncoil behind the not-to-be-disclosed address in central London. So one of the most riotous of theatrical experiences gets locked up as a secret, an uncommunicable dream. One that could become a nightmare if you are claustrophobic, wear high heels or don’t know the words to a Destiny’s Child number.

I was made giddy with pleasure when I did Bum Bum in 2010. This time round I was impressed but less exhilarated. Well, I was braced: for being continually surprised, though without a notion of what the surprises would be. Yet I wonder whether today’s Bum Bum virgins will be as intensely astonished as visitor-participants, or “passengers”, were 14 years ago, before the dramatic landscape had become so comprehensively punchdrunked. Audiences familiar with immersive theatre begin to control their experience. People move through the Punchdrunk landscapes exuding a sense of competitive purpose.

At Bum Bum, the distinction between passenger and performer is evaporating. Nearly everyone I know who attended this year did so as a volunteer helping to make the show: it was the best way to get tickets, which sold out almost immediately. The very idea of control has altered. Now everyone is used to being Alice in Wonderland in online life: choosing to go down a rabbit hole and then being swept hither and yon, with a mental universe that rapidly expands and contracts. It’s as if Bum Bum pointed the way.

Star ratings (out of five)
The Tempest ★★
Natasha, Pierre and the Great Comet of 1812 ★★★★★
You Me Bum Bum Train ★★★★

• The Tempest is on at the Theatre Royal Drury Lane, London, until 1 February 2025

• Natasha, Pierre & the Great Comet of 1812 is on at the Donmar Warehouse, London, until 8 February 2025

• You Me Bum Bum Train is on at a secret location, central London, until 30 January 2025