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Very occasionally an actor who has, for years, been giving finely-wrought, polished performances in the classics will suddenly, and without apparent warning, appear to have crossed a threshold and achieved a performance or two more remarkable than any his earlier work had indicated was likely. This seems to have happened this season to Derek Jacobi. His voice is as lyrical and romantic as any in the English theatre today; and his speaking of Shakespeare at least, poetry and prose, unsurpassed. Derek Jacobi's achievement is not to "star" as Prospero but to return the character to the play. It is one of the finest spoken, wisest, most humane performances I've seen an actor give in years.

Giles Gordon, Drama (magazine) Spring 1983

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"Spectacular Tempest"

Ron Daniel's production of "The Tempest" begins with a first-rate shipwreck. Then, with a lightning-flash, it is gone, to be replaced by Derek Jacobi's Prospero, a conductor lowering his baton on a taxing finale. Behind him lies the wreck of another ship, presumably the one on which he came to the island. Mr. Daniels pays rewarding attention to music and spectacle. He also has a master showman at the centre; Mr. Jacobi's is a gripping performance on several levels. It takes him as an actor beyond the skilled charm that got him through Benedick and Peer Gynt; there are deeper tones in his voice, more iron in his soul. Technically commanding, he is psychologically very acute. His Prospero is a man moving from one loneliness to another. His magic powers give him a relationship with Ariel that inspires affection on both sides, but no contact; the desires to have freedom and to bestow it become ambiguous things. For the masque of Juno, the bleached boat sports a traverse curtain, much in evidence thereafter and making the analogy of Prospero as magician with Shakespeare as the towering playwright more potent than I have know it. Mr. Jacobi stops the show with a passion that encompasses vocational disillusion, and leads logically and bitterly into "Our revels now are ended." Magic drains him, and it is a relief to give it up. A risk and a sacrifice as well: Mr. Jacobi gives careful emphasis to Prospero's decision to choose "reason" over "fury" and foreswear revenge. "And they shall be themselves," he says of his enemies: for better, but probably for worse.

Robert Cushman, The Observer August 15, 1982

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"Power and Fury"

Ron Daniels has raised The Tempest. Not since Peter Brook's production 25 years ago has there been a first-rate revival of this stubbornly undramatic play. But Mr. Daniels deploys a great range of magic and spectacle without swamping the poetry, and even injects a certain theatrical tension into a piece that can easily dwindle into a masque or oratorio. He does this through Derek Jacobi's vital and thrilling interpretation of Prospero, the best since Gielgud's. The problem with the play is that, since the main character holds all the cards, genuine conflict is non-existent. But Mr. Jacobi, commanding operations form Maria Bjornson's wrecked ghost-ship, discovers a conflict within Prospero himself. Instead of the usual benign headmaster dabbling in amateur magic, he offers a ferocious magus who has imposed his will on natural phenomena. In short, this becomes a play about an internal struggle between omnipotence and humanity. Because Mr. Jacobi's Prospero is young (not, as usual, four times as old as his brother), he has an understandable urge to get his dukedom back.

The tension comes from seeing how and when this Prospero will learn to love and what is fascinating is that Mr. Jacobi delays until the last second the access of charity. Even in renouncing magic, he clearly relishes it ("Graves at my command have waked their sleepers" has the macabre ring of Spielberg's Poltergeist); and at the very sight of his usurping brother the old bile returns. Indeed, only the sudden, silent appearance of Ariel and his side checks his ungovernable fury and leads to a hard-wrung, "I do forgive thee".

Mr. Jacobi brilliantly offers us a man who has elected to play God and who finds it hard to return to the prosaic trappings of mortality. Indeed, the production works because it never lets us forget this is a play about power. It's success lies in the way it shows Prospero using magic as an instrument of brute force, and gradually shedding his divine arrogance.

Michael Billington, The Guardian

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Derek Jacobi's Prospero is the most credibly human portrait, in my experience, of Miranda's father, Ariel's friend (as well as master) and the avenging magus transformed into a forgiving realist who knows that when his charms are broken his enemies, however penitent, "shall be themselves" again. He lacks something of Gielgud's lyrical magic and Redgrave's penetrating power; but the fact that his performance stands up so firmly to such comparisons illustrates Mr. Jacobi's still-growing mastery of the stage. Among the more memorable aspects of his performance are the gentle tenderness shown by Prospero for his daughter, and the warm affection of a different kind which he reveals for Ariel: when, at the end, Prospero suddenly apprehends that his "tricksy spirit" will soon leave him forever, Mr. Jacobi cuts us to the quick with his projected sense of anguished loss and emptiness.

Like Shakespeare himself (the parallel seems inescapable), Jacobi's magus is terminally exhausted by his necromantic reign. But It is experience, not old age, that makes him talk about a retirement where "every third thought shall be my grave", bereft of the "art to enchant", bereft of Ariel, and bereft of Miranda too. In Mr. Jacobi's performance, especially in his delivery of the later speeches and the epilogue, there are unmistakable and (one feels) authentic echoes of the master's [Shakespeare's] voice, and this effect is achieved without a show of 'dignity' or nudging revelation. Perhaps this fine performance of Prospero may turn out to be as significant a step in Derek Jacobi's career as Michael Redgrave's was for him at Stratford 31 years ago: Redgrave was only 43, Jacobi's age today. He shows a commanding authority, technical range, stamina, insight and voice. Theoretical problems of playing Prospero dissolve in practice. Seeing the play afresh, this seems the way to do the part,...even to BE it.

Richard Findlater, Plays & Players 1982

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At the centre of [this production] is a powerful, but low-key, interpretation of Prospero by Derek Jacobi. This is a performance whose authority comes from an unassertive humanity; from lines which are meditated rather than declaimed, and sentences that are delivered as much in sorrow as in anger. Jacobi's Prospero is a mortal, a scholar whose acquired magical skills seem to be a burden, an embarrassment and a surprise. When he announces "Our revels now are ended", there is a kind of relief mingled with resignation in his voice. We are made to understand the appeal of exchanging the insubstantial pageant of moral showbiz for the solid authority of a dukedom; or perhaps, in Shakespeare's terms, of renouncing the stage in favour of the retired life of a landowner.....Yet by the end, Jacobi's softly-spoken magician has developed such an intimacy with the audience that his epilogue strikes us not as a conventional set-piece, but as a thoughtful challenge both to himself and to us. We have seen him give up the role of playing God, and shrink from a magus to a mortal. Ariel has been released, to make the best, or the worst, of his freedom. The powers have all been switched off; we are left to our own devices in a Godless universe, with only the remembered images of Prospero's pageant to guide us. "My ending is despair/ Unless I be relieved by prayer." Prospero's renunciation of his magic powers, as the stage lights dim, becomes a moving symbolic event that ignites the light of our consciences.

David Nokes, The Time Literary Supplement 1982

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It has been a very strong season at Stratford. In the main house there is a notable "Tempest", whose great strength derives from the performances of Derek Jacobi as Prospero and Mark Rylance as Ariel. Mr. Jacobi seems more a ease than ever in this role, which gives him unquestioned authority on stage. He is a melancholy, often angry, Prospero. There is an element of self-accusation in him, as if he is aware of the dangers of abusing his great powers. The ever-repeated promises to Ariel that he will have his liberty in the end seem to come from a guilty conscience. Ariel, for his part, has a bitter interest in his liberty. It is an ambition which absorbs him to a mystical degree. Yet, as liberty approaches, there is also a melancholy condition---Ariel recognises his own pleasure is serving Prospero. The naive pride in his achievements as a servant gives way to a new feeling: he must choose between freedom and love, and he cannot help but choose freedom.

James Fenton The London Times 1982

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By the time the production had reached the Masque scene and moved into its "Magic Flute"-like phase with Prospero setting trials for the young lover, the setting seemed to have grown into the Barbican auditorium and provided a fine background for Derek Jacobi's impressive Prospero. For Jacobi, this Prospero is certainly a landmark role. In it he firmly puts behind him the little boy lost quality that has been an important element of his acting personality--even in Hamlet. If he lacks the ideal physical stature of a Gielgud or a Redgrave this does not matter because his authority resides in his voice, in his treatment of the verse, and in the tensions that he finds within Prospero himself. This Prospero's affection, for example, for his daughter is so great that he can hardly bear to see her even touched by anybody else, and his warnings to Ferdinand on the frailties of the flesh more than smack of the puritanical. Jacobi is also very good in conveying his attachment to Ariel who sometimes strikes one as a mirror image of a part of himself--a part that he has to loose at the end of the play at a cost of great pain and suffering. With this performance, Jacobi has entered authoritatively the craggy summits of Shakespeare acting that lead, in good time, to both Othello and Lear.

Peter Roberts Plays & Players 1983

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[Maria Bjornson's set could] constantly dazzle the eye and ravish the ear. [Never before in my memory had] all the elements of masque, magic, vengeance, and retribution combined with such force on one stage. And from the moment you set eyes on Derek Jacobi, shaking with rage as he commands the elements, there is no mistaking this Prospero's deep bitterness at his betrayal. This is no grizzled wizard whiling away his twilight years on an enchanted island. He is a man who has clearly been deposed in his prime, and is willing every demon in nature to extract his revenge.

Jack Tinker The Daily Mail 1983

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His Prospero is an interesting schizoid figure,...anxious to see Miranda mated, but peering round the leaning mast of the wrecked ghost-ship in case she goes too far;...exulting in having the usurping Italians in his power but swayed, finally, to forgiveness. [It was] touch and go to the very end......the fine moment when you see his gorge rising as Alsonso places a hand on his daughter....[helping to give] a much-needed dynamism to a play that often dwindles into tedium simply because Prospero holds all the cards.

Michael Billington The Guardian 1983