Excellently immersive and superbly fun, this abridged version is enhanced by an authenticity that is frankly incomparable to almost any other staging available to the Bard’s final play
Have you ever wanted to see Shakespeare performed on a full size Elizabethan ship? If so then this show is for you. Adapted into a sixty minute abridged version, The Tempest has been re-imagined into a site-specific (more probably site-sympathetic) promenade performance for all the ages. Just make sure you’ve got good knees and a knack for ladders.
We start our journey on the top deck, introduced by sea sprite Ariel (played by Cassandra Wilson) will be our guide. Taken gingerly downstairs in the lower deck, we are cramped in for the first couple of scenes establishing the mystery of the island and its characters therein.
Interestingly, this is where the audience is physically split and you follow either a character to the aft, or one to the upper deck of the ship. We were led upwards, enjoying the fresh air and seagulls (clearly trained to screech on cue) for a wonderful scene in which Caliban (played acrobatically by Hadrian Conyngham) delivers his marvelous Isle of Noises speech. We are then switched and head downstairs to continue as those downstairs head upwards. We are all eventually led to the bowels of the ship near the ballasts as the staging is performed in an inbuilt traverse seating arrangement. We watch as the conclusion of the schemes and romance comes forth into its inevitable happy ending.
The strongest performances come from Wilson’s Ariel and Conyngham’s Caliban, providing a mythological framework to proceedings. It felt more like a folkloric chronicle, passing down fables through oral retelling of ancient history. The smell of the timber provides immersion, alongside excellent use of creaking ship sound-scape, delicate fairy-tale music and fantastically atmospheric lighting .
The limits of such an intimate space in such a centrally urban location made itself known. At times the logistics of moving people about safely up and down the vessel felt like it slowed the pacing, whilst the promenade staging and natural acoustics meant thick timber beams absorbed sound frequently, so you often lost dialogue if the actors were not facing you. This was compounded by the fact that this abridged version reduced the actors to six: sometimes actors played two characters, and sometimes two actors played one character. If you were not already familiar with the story, you may have some difficulty following the intricacies of the plot.
Nevertheless, it is a truly quintessentially English experience to watch a Shakespearean play about the sea on a famous Elizabethan ship in the middle of London by the Thames foreshore, a stone’s through from The Globe. A genuinely transformative experience is created with a wonderful, dedicated cast and crew who have managed to create a sense of wonder and freshness to the text without drowning in the weight of the ship’s own history. It emerged as a perfectly symbiotic relationship between maritime and literary legacy, where one enhances the other marvelously for a memorably theatrical experience for all the family.
The Tempest was performed as part of the Totally Thames Festival and took place between 21st and 22nd September 2026 on board The Golden HInde, London.