Staging Shakespeare on an amateur stage was always going to be a bit of a gamble. Just how original can you really be with a dated, archaic script, limited student-production budgeting and centuries of past productions to live up to? Emma Wilkinson’s The Tempest bravely promised to do just that — to put ‘a new spin on an old tale’. Did it work? If only.

Don’t get me wrong, many aspects of the performance are brilliant. The set, for one, is truly awe-inspiring: an enormous, climbable ship deck, purportedly the largest single piece of set ever made for an ADC production in Cambridge, acts as both backdrop and balcony. Most of the cast members deliver strong performances, although it has to be said that the first shipwreck scene, unpolished and half-hearted, leaves the audience skeptical of its potential for improvement. The play takes a while to gain momentum, but Joey Akubeze’s powerful stage presence as Prospero and the imaginative use of music and props truly do the Bard’s genius justice.

What lets the production down is its lack of unity. The various plot-strands, whilst reasonably strong on their own, combine to leave the audience questioning what exactly it is Wilkinson is trying to achieve. Rebecca Hare and Laura Inge, Stephano and Trinculo respectively, nail the ‘clown’ interlude scenes, but the romantic subplot between Ferdinand (Sam Grabiner) and Miranda (Kate Reid) seem to belong more to pantomime than a Shakespeare production. Whilst the acting cannot be faulted, the directorial decision to portray the love affair as one between two barely post-pubescent, hyperactive, slightly brainless teenagers seems like a bit of a cop-out in comparison to the other, more commanding presences. The Caliban (Guy Clark) storyline seems woefully under-exploited, with the power of that beautiful ‘I cried to dream again’ speech – so often one of the most poignant moments of the spectacle –completely lost, seemingly through directorial decision to underplay his significance. Joey Akubeze, on the other hand, makes for a flawless Prospero who seems to jump straight out of the Elizabethan era, holding the show together even when it threatens to fall apart.

It is Mark Milligan, however, who absolutely steals the show with his interpretation of Ariel as a capricious, besuited ‘spirit’ of similar calibre to Constantine or The Devil’s Advocate. At some points hilariously camp and sarcastic, at others spine-chillingly demonic as he frolics with the humans’ sanities, and finally achieving real poignancy as he delivers that fatal ‘hell is empty, and all the devils are here’, Milligan takes every facet of this complex character’s personality and makes it his own.

All in all, a well-acted, well-presented performance, but one that, with the exception of Ariel, ultimately fails to break the Shakespearean mould. Worth seeing? Yes. Memorable? Hardly.