Despite Dillane's splendid role, soporific Tempest shows failure of Sam Mendes' Bridge Project #hf10

 By Wijbrand Schaap (photo Joan Marcus)

You can have Bach's St Matthew Passion performed by 15 canaries, an electric guitar, a drum kit, a ukulele and a harmonica, and it will still be beautiful, because it is Bach. Similarly, you can have Shakespeare's thoroughly British plays performed by a group of Americans, and it will still be Shakespeare, but then we are on the edge. This has been apparent since we were able to take note of The Tempest, part two of the diptych of Sam Mendes' Bridge Project, to be seen at the Holland Festival.

The brilliant sexual disguise comedy As You Like It conducted the Americanised Brit Mendes far too serious and slow from. He has managed to turn The Tempest into a rare soporific piece of tribal sound theatre, with only one solitary highlight: the lead role of Stephen Dillane. A Brit, indeed.

The Tempest (1611) tells quite a few stories, and that is immediately the major problem with this last play that the great Briton wrote on his own. After all, the setting is an island on which a sorcerer lives with his daughter, an air spirit and a monster, and this sorcerer has a ship full of Italian notables washed ashore. This in itself not too everyday situation is clarified through a lot of narration, which very briefly boils down to the fact that the sorcerer is the exiled Duke of Milan who has been brooding on revenge against his brother for 12 years.

Should this all seem a bit magical, science fiction-like even, then that's right, and that's where American actors go wrong with their director. Think of the difference between Star Wars and Dr Who. Star Wars is perfectly executed bloody seriousness, and Dr Who a deliberately clumsy fantasy here and there. With their famed lack of mild self-mockery, Americans take what is improbable far more seriously than what is imaginable, and then you end up with Shakespeare with very, very bent toes.

Only Stephen Dillane (pictured centre) has got the right ironic tone. In doing so, he puts Shakespeare's magical tale in proportion as a beautiful story, and not as Dances with Wolves part two.

The just-real acting of the Americans, prompted to do so by director Sam Mendes, who once starred in the film American Beauty revealed another fine example of British irony, does not fit Shakespeare's work. In that respect, this Tempest mainly demonstrates the failure of the bridging attempt that is The Bridge Project. Although: I would also be curious about very ironically executed works by American icons like O'Neill or Arthur Miller.

Let's see how that falls across the big pond.

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• Press reviews: Sam Mendes' production of The Tempest (news.bbc.co.uk)
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• Sam Mendes's The Tempest in New York, review (telegraph.co.uk)
• Regina Weinreich: Brave New World: The Tempest at BAM (huffingtonpost.com)
• Dillane's longest five minutes (guardian.co.uk)