THE TEMPEST

The Golden Hinde

★★★★

“Inventive, playful and full of salt air, this is Shakespeare with its sea legs on”

Few theatres make you happy you went to the gym. The Golden Hinde, the full-size replica of Sir Francis Drake’s galleon moored on Bankside, certainly does. The audience ducks, crouches and clambers up stairs and under beams throughout the performance. Rebekah King’s hour-long adaptation of William Shakespeare’s The Tempest is part of the Totally Thames festival, the river’s month-long celebration each September. It uses the ship brilliantly: less a backdrop than a leading character.

The story is Shakespeare’s revenge fantasy. Prospero, the exiled Duke of Milan, has spent twelve years marooned on an island with his daughter Miranda, the spirit Ariel and the brooding Caliban. When a ship carrying his old enemies sails close, he conjures a storm to wreck it. What follows is a tangle of magic, mischief and young love as he decides whether to forgive.

King’s boldest and most interesting move is telling the tale from the servants’ perspective. Much of the courtly scheming is stripped back. What remains is the island seen through the eyes of those bound to Prospero’s will. This makes a familiar play feel newly strange.

The conceit is simple and irresistible: All the ship’s a stage. The audience follows the cast from top deck to hold. The play moves through the galleon as the plot moves across the island. Director Callie Nestleroth steers a six-strong cast and a roaming crowd through tight corners with real ingenuity. The effect is intimate, a little chaotic and masses of fun. When the tempest strikes, you are not watching a shipwreck; you are standing in one.

The lighting, sound and costumes do a lot with very little. The old timbers supply most of the atmosphere.

Cassandra Wilson, doubling as Ariel and Miranda, commands the ship as surely as any captain. King makes Ariel the storyteller, guiding us between decks. Wilson switches between spirit and daughter with clarity and conviction. In a production that never stands still, she is the fixed point every eye returns to. Zoé Badovinac doubles as Prospero and his treacherous brother Antonio. She heads a committed ensemble of Hadrian Conyngham, Charlie Woodward, Oliver George Wood and Lauren Grierson, all negotiating the cramped decks with admirable agility.

The pace is brisk, and the cast doubling takes some effort to track. Those who know the play will enjoy seeing what’s revealed by the significant edits. Newcomers may struggle to keep up, and would do well to read a synopsis before boarding.

Inventive, playful and full of salt air, this is Shakespeare with its sea legs on. A museum piece has been turned into a playground for one of the Bard’s most magical tales. Come knowing the story, and prepare to duck.

THE TEMPEST

The Golden Hinde as part of Totally Thames 2026

Reviewed on 22nd September 2026

by Elizabeth Botsford

Photography by Julian Guidera

THE TEMPEST

Glitch

Studio – The Vaults

Reviewed – 7th March 2020

★★★

“some lovely moments of warmth”

The tone of the performance is set when I’m met on entry by a beaming steward, all warmth and reassurance. She directs me to empty seats and offers sunglasses and earplugs. Not your usual production, you might be thinking. But all becomes clear; she addresses the audience before the play starts and clarifies that this is a relaxed performance, meaning we can come and go, use the earplugs or sunglasses, do whatever we need to feel comfortable.

This is a great touch (and still all-too rare), but nothing more than you’d expect, given the content of the play. Glitch is a one-hander, with Krystina Nellis as our heroine Kelly, and Kelly is autistic – or, in her words, ‘weird. Diagnosably weird’.

Kelly is a likeable protagonist, trapped in a small town where it’s still ok to call someone living with autism a ‘psycho’, or ‘retard’. Nellis brings her to life well, including the odd amusingly wry remark and some lovely moments of warmth; Kelly’s experiences of losing herself to dance and singing in the questionable local nightclub, for example, are especially touching. She also handles the painful unfolding of Kelly’s grief well, and with sweetness; her dad goes quickly from being ‘fine’ to very, very not fine, and we see this all through Kelly’s straightforward, practical viewpoint. When she sits in a corner with her console and plays video games during his wake, we’re there with her and it’s clear it’s not only not ‘weird’: this makes sense.

Glitch is also something of an homage to video gaming and the communities around it. Kelly finds solace in games and, as the play continues, a true friend. This gaming connection is gorgeously brought to life by the screen on stage, which not only brings us Kelly’s words in real time but also the characters, rendered perfectly, and with changing backdrops (an affordance not otherwise possible in this black box studio), in 90s dot matrix-game style. It’s a lovely touch and enlivens the performance with just the occasional distraction when Nellis deviates wildly from the on-screen text.

This is one element that does, in the end, undermine the show a little; Nellis seems unsteady with the script, sometimes stumbling or repeating. The informal, chatty tone of Kelly’s delivery allows much of this to be absorbed into the performance, but occasionally it feels unnerving. And the narrative drive here can feel a little rambling, with the content perhaps demanding a little less than the full hour it’s given. Tightness would help let some of the funnier, and more powerful, moments really sing.

But all told, we leave on good terms with the small town of Sutward’s favourite ‘weirdo’. For, as the play asks, who gets to say what ‘normal’ is anyway – and why should we care?

Tag Archives: Callie Nestleroth

THE TEMPEST

★★★★

The Golden Hinde

THE TEMPEST

The Golden Hinde

★★★★

“Inventive, playful and full of salt air, this is Shakespeare with its sea legs on”

THE TEMPEST