The Tempest (2010) BBC 2 written and directed by Julie Taymor

I’m not going to tell you who the original writer was, but I can tell you some of his themes involve the fading power of old men, gender swapping, love at first sight and a plot that he’s picked up from crumpled bits of folio that have been lying around his garret. This is no different in that Prospero started off in the original folio and was definitely a man. Helen Mirren is definitely a woman. Her Morgana all those years ago in Excalibur would have given a hard-on to a dead man lying in his coffin. Prospero is played by Helen Mirror here, the mother of Felicity Jones who plays her daughter Miranda. She’s play-cute in her flighty night dress and ready for love at first sight with (Reeve Carney) Ferdinand, the King of Naples’ son, who has wronged her mother. In fact everybody has wronged her mother, Prospero, apart from the faithful (Tom Conti) Gonzalo who provided food and water and flung in her/his occult library in case she got bored wandering the seas in her exile from the Dukedom of Milan. Those old books came in handy in freeing the sprite (Ben Whishaw)Ariel from—I think it was a shell—he was imprisoned in by the witch Sycorax. Now he is enslaved to Prospero and as a naked adolescent boy there is an erotic love interest between them, which I’d never thought of in the original text, but then again Shakespeare did dedicate two-thirds of his sonnets to young men he’d immortalised and probably did a bit more than that. Here the special effects is plastic, spending lots of times twirling Ariel about so the audience cannot see he has a penis, like one of those Action Men that are smooth downstairs. With Helen Mirren I’d be a willing stand in. Ariel when he is not nipping off the island to Asda to get supplies for their penthouse on the island rounds up a few ships that David Strathairn (King of Naples)  and the arch villains (Chris Cooper) Antonio, Prospero’s brother who replace him/her as Duke of Milan and (Alan Cumming) Sebastian who in echoes of Macbeth is persuaded by Antonio to kill his brother the King and gain the throne himself, as they both believe his son and heir drowned. Ariel helps stop them. There’s another plot that is meant to be funny so Russell Brand is roped into play Alonso’s jester Trinculo also washed up on the island with (Alfred Molina) the drunken Stephano, Alonso’s butler. Russell Brand, of course, never acts anybody but himself and if this was an action movie I’d get Bruce Willis or Rambo in to smack him about a bit. They meet with (Djimon Hounsou) Caliban a black bull of a man, Sycorax’s son and rightful heir to the island, who snorts and rages, a towering performance, about his enslavement to Prospero, but immediately promises fealty to this unlikely pairing if they kill Prospero and burn her books. Obviously they don’t, because nobody kills Helen Mirren and gets away with it.

At the end there’s mention of a brave new world. Huxley’s book I suspect came from this source. His lesser known work ‘The Island’ a utopian novel also points in that direction and is a damn good read. In Huxley’s island, of course, the natives are taught that sex is not a bad thing and children encouraged to play with one another’s fiddly-bits to free them from sexual inhibition. Now, of course, I know that wouldn’t work. Adults would fuck them up and the sound of betrayal of an ultra-conservative David- Cameron- like government circling in helicopters and ready to take over the island might even be a welcome sound.

I’ve been handed stacks and stacks of books people are flinging out. Almost everyone has on the jacket page ‘International bestseller’. I’m not sure what to do with them. I’ve tried separating the sheep from the goats—the ones I would read and the ones I wouldn’t. But I keep shuffling them. Shame. Shame.Shame. Maybe. Maybe. Maybe. I need to be braver.