Mike McCahill 

Tempest – review

Seventeen London youngsters mount a production of The Tempest – but this documentary account is a bit too wind-tossed, writes Mike McCahill
  
  

Tempest
Choppy … Tempest. Photograph: PR

A record of a project almost certainly more worthwhile than the film itself. In late 2011, with the London riots fresh in the mind, 17 youngsters were recruited to enact Shakespeare's storm-play on an Oval housing estate. Their efforts are here given an off-putting, skittish treatment, slapping together rehearsal footage with animated inserts and talking heads that suggest how Prospero may have washed up on TV's The Office. The kids energise it, but it's a choppy jumble of good intentions and half-realised ideas, too wind-tossed in its structure to function even as a useful teaching aid.

 

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