SOURCE: Smallwood, Robert. Review of The Tempest. Shakespeare Survey 53 (2000): 244-73.

In the following excerpted review, Smallwood calls Jude Kelly's 1999 production of The Tempest at the West Yorkshire Playhouse “deeply disappointing” save for Sir Ian McKellen's mesmerizing Prospero.

From The Winter's Tale to The Tempest is not a long step in most chronological lists of Shakespeare's plays, but the symbolic significance of Sir Ian McKellen's journey from London to Leeds to play in a repertory season at the West Yorkshire Playhouse that included Prospero in a production of The Tempest directed by Jude Kelly was much commented upon by reviewers. The play was offered in a grim and ugly prison-cell set by Robert Innes Hopkins, draped at the back with polythene sheeting, chains hanging from walls decorated with a daily chalk-mark to record the long months and years of Prospero's exile, piles of logs on either side, pieces of...