The common core of Jon Bausor’s stage design for these RSC productions of the specious “Shipwreck Trilogy” includes a water tank beneath the front of the Royal Shakespeare Theatre stage, which serves as the dockside in The Comedy Of Errors and the hotel pool in this conceptualisation of Twelfth Night. It is grimly unsurprising that for The Tempest, the most consistently watery of these three plays if not of all 37 by Shakespeare, the tank is drained. One can probably imagine an intellectual justification for the decision, but it instinctively feels perverse.

The same is true of Jonathan Slinger’s tyrannical characterisation of Prospero. Slinger is simply giving full rein to all the tetchy, irascible remarks normally treated as throwaways, and it is easy to consider how his years of exile on this isle may have embittered Prospero; but the effect is to turn him effectively into the villain of the play. Ariel, so completely Prospero’s creature that Sandy Grierson is identically dressed and similarly shaven-headed, cowers and cringes more than does Caliban. Casting one of this ensemble’s Palestinian actors, Amer Hlehel, as Caliban foregrounds the neo-colonialist interpretation of his and Prospero’s relationship, but this is hobbled by the undignified malice he evidences in the middle acts. As Miranda, Emily Taaffe is once again tripped up by her youthful compulsion to fill a large space such as this with her voice.

Upstage, director David Farr has placed a large silvered-glass cubicle from which most of Prospero’s conjurations, mortal figures and spirits alike, emerge: a kind of cabinet of curiosities. The various wonders are nicely realised, but nothing can overcome the re-orientation at the core of this production. It makes us think that Prospero’s lot at the end is not so much the restoration of his rightful dukedom or the fatalistic getting of wisdom as the arrival of the desolation that is his due after his years of despotism here. His epilogue is delivered by Slinger with an almost complete lack of affect, which is hardly persuasive to “let your indulgence set me free” with our applause. This trilogy of productions with the same ensemble cast, an early flagship for the RSC’s contribution to 2012’s World Shakespeare Festival, are far from full-blooded Regietheater, but certainly partake of that approach whereby concepts often ride roughshod over dramatic usefulness.

Written for the Financial Times.