Sigourney Weaver’s West End debut as Prospero evokes a storm of past Tempests

I have one thing in common with Andrew Lloyd Webber: we both saw John Gielgud play Prospero at the Theatre Royal Drury Lane in 1957. The big difference is that, since Lord Lloyd Webber now owns the theatre, he was able to suggest Shakespeare be revived at the Lane for the first time in 67 years in the shape of a new Jamie Lloyd production of The Tempest starring Sigourney Weaver. It is an imaginative piece of casting and set me thinking, as someone who has looked on a storm of Tempests, about Prosperos of the past.

The play itself is, as Anne Barton once wrote, “an extraordinarily obliging work of art”: it is open to multiple meanings and endlessly diverse stagings. Prospero can also be played in a variety of ways but, surveying the 40 or so productions I have seen, I have picked out four key interpretations. There is Prospero the magus, the impresario, the colonialist and the despot. The categories are far from being mutually exclusive. Indeed one sign of a great Prospero is the ability to combine them all but at least they give a handy guide to the role’s complexities.

The magus is an obvious starting point since the character is thought to have been based on John Dee who was accused of sorcery at Cambridge and who later became astrologer to Elizabeth I. When Gielgud played Prospero – for the third time – in Peter Hall’s 1974 National Theatre production he actually resembled Dee, in his black skull cap and white ruff. But it was in Hall’s 1988 National production that I felt I was witnessing the supernatural. Michael Bryant’s Prospero was a necromancer who resembled Faust dabbling with dark forces. When Bryant told us “graves at my command / Have waked their sleepers, oped and let ’em forth,” you felt that he was a traumatised figure anxious to renounce more than simply “rough” magic.

If Prospero is a diabolist, he can also be seen as a surrogate director staging his own drama of revenge. In 1988 – a year that saw four major productions – two stood out as examples of meta-theatre. In Declan Donnellan’s Cheek by Jowl version Timothy Walker’s Prospero was a tyrannical actor-manager watching much of the action from a stage dressing-room. More elaborate was Haruhiko Joh’s Prospero in Yukio Ninagawa’s Noh-inspired production that had him kick-starting each scene with a handclap. The problem with this approach, however, is that it overplays Prospero’s omnipotence and drains the other characters of autonomy.

The more fashionable line these days is to treat Prospero as a symbol of colonialism. In Britain it was Jonathan Miller who, having read a book by Octave Mannoni about the French colonisation of Madagascar, pioneered this interpretation in a 1970 production that had Graham Crowden as a touchily neurotic Prospero lording it over Norman Beaton’s Ariel and Rudolph Walker’s Caliban whose cry of “This island’s mine” carried extra weight. Countless productions have followed in Miller’s wake including one he himself did in 1988 with Max von Sydow as Prospero – but few with such subtlety. What I remember from Miller’s original is Prospero’s belated acquisition of sympathy in acknowledging his guilt and the need for a transference of power.

This reading shades into the final category of Prospero as despot, which all the best actors deploy. I remember Gielgud in that 1957 Peter Brook production as an angry, bare-chested figure who made you feel it was touch and go whether he would forgive his enemies. But the tendency to tyranny was there in Derek Jacobi (1982), John Wood (1988) and, most recently, Simon Russell Beale in Gregory Doran’s hi-tech 2016 production. One moment stands out from that last performance. “Our revels now are ended”, instead of being a golden aria, became a father’s furious attempt to interrupt Ferdinand’s physical dalliance with an all-too-pliant Miranda.

The role also transcends gender. The first female Prospero I saw was Valerie Braddell who, in a 1981 version, made the usurped Queen of Milan a motherly figure at one point taking Caliban into her protective arms. Vanessa Redgrave in 2000 was a physically commanding presence but I regret missing Harriet Walter’s Prospero in an all-female production at the Donmar in 2016. If I’ve learned anything over the years, it is that Prospero is a role that brings out the peculiar qualities of its interpreter. Oscar Wilde said that there are as many Hamlets as there are actors and exactly the same rule applies to Prospero.

• The Tempest is at Theatre Royal Drury Lane, London, 7 December to 1 February.