The Tempest at the RSC (2026): Prospero’s Rehearsal Room and the Politics of Empire

The RSC’s 2026 production of The Tempest, directed by Richard Eyre, is bold and incisive in both its central concept and its theatrical metaphors. It directly foregrounds some of the most important questions embedded in Shakespeare’s text: colonialism, racism, and Prospero’s role as the manipulator of the entire island.

The first thing to consider is precisely this image of Prospero as the island’s controlling force. In Shakespeare’s play, Prospero uses magic to create the storm, commands Ariel to produce illusions and terrify Alonso’s party, and orchestrates the masque for Miranda and Ferdinand’s betrothal. In Eyre’s production, this idea of manipulation is presented with remarkable directness.

The stage consists almost entirely of a movable circular wooden platform. There is no naturalistic suggestion of sand, earth, coastline, or outdoor island landscape. From the beginning, Eyre makes it clear that this is not simply an island. It is Prospero’s rehearsal room. This becomes especially significant later in the production’s postcolonial framework.

Prospero as Conductor

Before the performance begins, Kenneth Branagh’s Prospero is already standing downstage left, wearing a magical robe embroidered with constellations. In front of him is a music stand holding sheet music. In his hand is not the usual staff or wand associated with Prospero’s magic, but a conductor’s baton.

He faces the stage, raises both hands, takes a deep breath, and conducts.

The performance begins.

In an instant, projections of a violent storm fill the huge screen at the back of the stage. Ropes and sailcloth descend from above. Alonso’s party climb out through trapdoors in the circular wooden platform, adjusting the sails and clinging to ropes as the platform rocks back and forth like a ship at sea.

The use of trapdoors is worth noticing. In early modern staging, trapdoors were often associated with hell, evil, or the underworld, and this association has continued in many modern productions of Shakespeare and his contemporaries. Of course, here the trapdoors can simply be read as the ship’s lower deck, from which Alonso’s party climb up to the deck during the storm. Yet given Alonso’s role in assisting Antonio’s usurpation of Prospero’s dukedom, which leads to Prospero and Miranda’s exile on the island, the image is difficult to ignore. The orange-red light glowing from below makes that association even more suggestive.

Within Prospero’s own narrative, Alonso and his followers appear as figures of evil. When Prospero tells Miranda the story of his usurpation, the projection behind them becomes a mixture of deep green, black, and white smoke, colours conventionally associated with menace and corruption. Antonio stands before this projection, his lower body hidden in darkness, almost like a ghost haunting Prospero’s memory.

Colour plays a major role throughout the production. Prospero wears a blue magical robe, and his magic is also represented through deep blue light. Dark blue on stage often suggests negative or troubled emotional states. Here, however, when combined with the green and black imagery associated with betrayal and evil, as well as Prospero’s eventual renunciation of magic, the colour becomes more complex. It suggests not simple darkness, but mystery, ambivalence, and moral uncertainty.

Miranda, by contrast, wears a yellow-orange dress, a colour associated with sunlight and dawn. Her costume echoes the colours of the projection screen whenever the island appears calm and untouched by Prospero’s darker magic. When Prospero uses more threatening forms of magic, the projections are mixed with black and other deep colours. When he lulls Miranda to sleep, the screen shifts into soft pinks, purples, and starlit colours, almost like a Disney fairy tale. When he is still on the island but no longer actively imposing magic upon the world, the projections return to colours closer to the dawn-like warmth of Miranda’s dress.

The Island as Rehearsal Room

This idea of the island as a rehearsal room becomes increasingly explicit in the second half. Prospero, as conductor and director, repeatedly interrupts the performance he is supposedly controlling from within.

At one point, when Ariel prepares to perform magic at Prospero’s command, Prospero abruptly stops the action. The lighting and music stop with him. The theatrical illusion collapses.

This is most striking during Miranda and Ferdinand’s wedding masque. The lovers’ meeting, courtship, and marriage have all been planned by Prospero, and their wedding, therefore, appears almost like a rehearsed ceremonial performance. Dressed in white, Miranda and Ferdinand dance with the spirits. Four white cushions are brought onto the stage and placed on the floor, as if preparing for a wedding-night scene. When Miranda and Ferdinand embrace, surrounded by Ariel and the spirits, Prospero suddenly calls a stop.

The projections and lighting that created the magical atmosphere vanish. The stage shifts into a black background and harsh white light. What had seemed, moments earlier, to be an enchanted island ceremony is suddenly exposed as a rigid rehearsal-room scene under bright working lights.

This metaphor appears throughout the production. During Prospero’s soliloquies, a deep blue spotlight falls on him, only to change suddenly into white light, transforming the stage into something closer to a black box theatre. Prospero stands at the centre as the director of the whole theatrical mechanism.

At the end of the production, once Prospero gives up magic, resumes his position as Duke, and releases Caliban and Ariel, the projection screen that has dominated the performance finally falls. Behind it is the real backstage space of the Royal Shakespeare Theatre: black-painted brick walls, trolleys, boxes, tables, and chairs.

Only then does the audience fully understand why the projections throughout the production have seemed so deliberately artificial. When Alonso’s party explores the island, the screen shows an almost stereotypical computer-generated rainforest, resembling a default desktop background, with an orange sun in the upper-right corner. During Miranda and Ferdinand’s masque, the screen projects planets from the solar system. Ariel’s flying is also fully visible as a stage mechanism; the wires and machinery are never hidden. Similarly, when Ariel conjures a wardrobe to trick Trinculo and Stephano, the wardrobe is simply lowered by machinery from above, openly suspended on stage.

What first appears clumsy or overly theatrical begins to make sense retrospectively. Everything has been a rehearsal. Everything has been a performance directed by Prospero. The characters have been actors inside the story he stages.

Colonialism and the Rehearsed Story

The metaphor of the whole story as a rehearsal is especially important within the production’s treatment of colonialism and postcolonial narrative.

As I mentioned at the beginning, this production is remarkably bold in its handling of The Tempest’s colonial content. The play's colonialism and racism are not hidden in Shakespeare’s text. Prospero’s enslavement of both Caliban and Ariel, his violence towards them, and the other characters’ degrading, racist language about Caliban all make these questions unavoidable.

Yet many productions still choose to reproduce the text’s ambiguity by presenting Caliban as monstrous or animalistic, while Ariel remains an elegant, ethereal spirit. Such stagings may appear gentle, but they often continue the colonial logic of the original text: Caliban can remain a monster, rather than being fully recognised as a human being.

Eyre makes a very different choice. Caliban is played by Ashley Zhangazha, a Black actor, and he appears not as a beast but as a dignified man in seventeenth-century clothing, wearing a ruffled shirt and trousers. The impact is extraordinary.

When he says:

‘This island’s mine by Sycorax, my mother,
Which thou tak’st from me’
(Temp. 1. 2. 395–96)

and later:

‘For I am all the subjects that you have,
Which first was mine own king’
(Temp. 1. 2. 407–08)

The force of the lines becomes startling.

This is why the rehearsal-room metaphor matters so much. By making the whole story appear as a performance directed by Prospero, the production turns colonialism itself into something staged, constructed, rehearsed, and imposed. Eyre tears open the colonial content of The Tempest. By casting Black actors as Caliban, Ariel, and the other spirits, the production makes it visually clear that the island belongs to them. Introducing race into the production makes the politics of land ownership far more direct than the original distinction between ‘spirit’ and ‘monster.’ It reminds the audience that this island is Caliban’s and Ariel’s land, just as European colonial powers claimed and occupied lands across Africa and the Americas.

The programme notes that Shakespeare drew directly on contemporary accounts of colonial disaster in the Americas, including the 1609 voyage of nine ships to the New World, one of which was driven by a storm to Bermuda. This historical context sits uneasily beside the play’s colonial and racist language: Prospero’s ‘A devil, a born devil, on whose nature / Nurture can never stick’ (Temp. 4. 1. 188–89); Miranda’s ‘When thou didst not, savage, / Know thine own meaning, but wouldst gabble like / A thing most brutish’ (Temp. 1. 2. 426–28); Trinculo’s dehumanising question, ‘What have we here, a man or a fish?’ (Temp. 2. 2. 25); and the brutally revealing line, ‘They will lay out ten to see a dead Indian’ (Temp. 2. 2. 32–33).

These lines are not marginal. They belong to the structure of the play’s colonial imagination.

Caliban as Lear

One of the production’s most powerful interventions is that it places Caliban, visually and theatrically, in the position of King Lear.

Before Caliban encounters Trinculo and Stephano, he curses Prospero for his surveillance and abuse, calling down plagues upon him. In this scene, Eyre has Caliban stand centre stage wearing a dark green cloak and carrying a woven bamboo basket on his back. Beneath the cloak, the basket creates a raised, bent shape behind his body, making his back appear hunched, almost like Lear’s body in the storm.

As the storm breaks around him, Caliban stands like Lear on the heath, a dispossessed figure crying out against fate. The connection is not merely visual. Like Lear, he is exposed to weather, stripped of power, and forced to articulate suffering in a landscape that seems to answer only with violence. Like Lear, he encounters figures of madness and folly: just as Lear meets Edgar disguised as Poor Tom, Caliban meets the chaotic, ridiculous Trinculo.

This is not a casual intertextual echo. It significantly changes Caliban’s position in the production. He is no longer staged as the comic monster of the island. He becomes a tragic Shakespearean figure, one whose rage and curses emerge from dispossession, abuse, and the loss of sovereignty.

Costume, Otherness, and the Coloniser’s Gaze

Caliban’s dignity and the bloodstains on his costume also point to the violence he has suffered as an Indigenous figure under colonial rule. Costume design is particularly interesting in this production.

Prospero and Miranda wear relatively modern clothes. Ariel and the spirits wear costumes associated with their magical identities. When Caliban first enters wearing a seventeenth-century ruffled shirt, I initially thought costume designer Carol Lingwood might be suggesting that the colonised Indigenous figure remains trapped within the historical trauma of colonial invasion.

However, when Alonso and his party appear in seventeenth-century, Shakespearean-period clothing, the meaning shifts. Lingwood seems less interested in presenting Caliban as historically trapped than in emphasising otherness. Prospero and Miranda, though themselves colonisers in relation to Caliban and Ariel, are also exiles from their mother country. In the eyes of the arriving nobles, they too have become displaced, scrutinised, and strange.

This becomes especially clear when Miranda first meets Ferdinand. Ferdinand assumes that Miranda, as an island inhabitant, will not speak English and has not been civilised. He slows his speech and gestures with his hands as he tries to communicate with her. Only when Miranda answers in English does he finally relax: ‘My language! Heavens!’ (Temp. 1. 2. 585).

The irony is sharp. Miranda has only just come to understand herself and Prospero as representatives of civilisation, yet Ferdinand initially treats her as an uncivilised native of the island. The production reveals how unstable the category of “civilised” really is. Those who claim superiority over others may themselves become the Other when viewed from the perspective of a different centre of power.

As Miranda moves towards marriage with Ferdinand, her wedding dress begins to resemble the shape of a Shakespearean-period gown. At the end, when Prospero regains his dukedom, he removes his magical robe and puts on historically appropriate clothing and a hat. Costume, therefore, traces the movement back into European courtly order, even as the production continues to question the violence required to restore it.

Music and the Life of the Island

Music is used extensively throughout the production, and this becomes one of its most vivid theatrical features. Musicians play live African djembe drums from the balconies on either side of the stage, giving the island a sound world that is rhythmically present and physically alive.

This musical language also reinforces the production’s postcolonial framing. The island is never a silent or empty space waiting for Prospero’s art to animate it. It already has rhythm, sound, and communal life. Caliban’s songs, Ariel’s movement, and the presence of live percussion all help build an island that belongs to those whom Prospero has tried to control.

Returning the Island

The production’s final added image is one of its most important. At the end, Prospero places his magical robe over Caliban’s shoulders and kneels before him, acknowledging the return of the island, the colonised land, to its rightful inhabitant.

This gesture is direct, but it feels necessary. It provides the postcolonial conclusion towards which the whole production has been moving.

Watching this moment, I was reminded of the Acknowledgement of Country that I heard repeatedly before performances during my time in Australia:

We acknowledge the Traditional Owners of Country throughout Australia and acknowledge their continuing connection to land, waters and community. We pay our respects to the people, the cultures and the Elders past and present.

Eyre’s production finally grants Caliban and Ariel something like that recognition. The island is no longer treated merely as Prospero’s stage, laboratory, or rehearsal room. It is returned, symbolically, to those from whom it was taken.

In doing so, this Tempest moves beyond simply exposing the colonial violence embedded in Shakespeare’s play. It imagines, however briefly and theatrically, an act of restitution. The performance begins with Prospero conducting the island as if it were his own creation. It ends with him kneeling before Caliban, forced at last to acknowledge that the island was never truly his.

Production: The Tempest
Company: Royal Shakespeare Company
Director: Richard Eyre
Venue: Royal Shakespeare Theatre, Stratford-upon-Avon
Date Viewed: 11 June 2026