If you’re going to combine theatre with acrobatics, you really need to be good at both. Backhand Theatre are good at acrobatics.The storm sequence (though if you don’t know the play you might not guess that’s what it is) which opens the play is exciting and atmospheric, though I don’t see any good reason why it couldn’t have been combined with the text from the first scene. However, these opening minutes are the highlight of the play, whose pace and intensity lulls awfully between the three acrobatic setpieces. The other three quarters of a play seem boring and perfunctory, a mere excuse for those ten acrobatic minutes, and as such this play is impossible really to praise in any wholehearted way.It’s something of a horrible criticism to make, but the overbearing impression from hearing the actors deliver their lines is that they aren’t really sure what they mean, or at least how to convince their audience that they are. Protestations of love, hatred and surprise are made in the exact same ‘I’m reading verse now’ tone which smothers Shakespeare’s artfully variegated language underneath.They aren’t helped by a script which appears to have been prepared by a blindfolded man overfond of the delete key. Trinculo and Stephano are cut (surely a missed opportunity for drunken acrobatic sequences), though Caliban is left danging for no good reason, given 15 lines of uncontextualised speech from a different scene. Gonzalo appears in one scene and never comes back. None of these is a ruinous criticism in itself, but each does reveal a cavalier attitude to the text which severely compromises the audience’s engagement with the inevitably confused lines which escape the knife.With a more considered approach, combining The Tempest with acrobatic performance could be a really wonderful way to bring out the, quite literal, magic of Shakespeare’s work, but this, unfortunately, is a very long way away from that kind of brilliance.
