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British actress Juliet Rylance plays Miranda in The Tempest

Tony and Oscar-winning director Sam Mendes has unveiled his version of Shakespeare’s The Tempest in New York, in the second season of the transatlantic Bridge Project.

Critics are divided on the production at the Brooklyn Academy of Music (BAM), which stars Stephen Dillane as Prospero, Juliet Rylance as Miranda, and Thomas Sadoski as Stephano.

The overall mood of the entire production is one of almost torpor-like calm. It is full of beautiful effects, but not much dramatic tension. And since it runs at two hours and 25 minutes without an interval, you begin to long for the comic business (broadly played by Thomas Sadoski as the drunken Stephano and Anthony O’Donnell as Trinculo), or for the brief appearances of Juliet Rylance’s radiant Miranda.

But then, right at the end, Mendes pulls off a brilliant coup. As Prospero gives Ariel his freedom and breaks his staff, giving up his power and his "rough magic", the light suddenly disappears and the wall is black; the enchantment has literally vanished. This is the grey reality of the real world, of life outside the theatre, away from a place where everything can be resolved.

Dillane’s Prospero is a gentle father and scholar, both manipulating and observing the proceedings with a benevolent detachment. It’s a contained, thoughtful portrayal that matches Mendes’ elemental staging: a circle of sand, a shallow pool. Water and earth, reason and the supernatural, the seen and the unseen convincingly coexist on this island outside of the normal time-space continuum.

Mr Mendes’s production makes no radical statements, although Mr Camargo’s gothic androgyne, Ariel, is an appealing innovation. With a nightclub pallor, dressed alternately in a sleek, black Jil Sander-ish suit, a slinky evening gown or a winged contraption that recalls the 90s superhero movie The Crow, this Ariel is a more sombre sentinel than the familiar, flitting sprite. It’s a fresh, unexpected approach, and Mr Camargo speaks the verse with a cool beauty. Despite a moment of early violent conflict (one of the bits that doesn’t quite ring true), Ariel’s rapport with Mr Dillane’s Prospero is intimate, touching and real.

It takes a director as powerful as Sam Mendes to turn Shakespeare’s supremely poetic Tempest into something as deplorable as what the Bridge Company is offering at the Brooklyn Academy of Music. All lyricism is wantonly excised.

Proceeding perhaps from Prospero’s late speech, "This rough magic I here abjure," Mendes systematically abjures from the get-go every bit of magic in his dogged destruction.

After a lyrical and airy production of As You Like It, the Bridge Project, Sam Mendes’ company featuring British and American artists, continues to dazzle and delight with a gritty yet equally moving mounting of The Tempest.

Most productions emphasize the magical elements of Shakespeare’s late tale of the shipwrecked duke Prospero; his daughter, Miranda; his ethereal aide, Ariel; and the monstrous Caliban. Mendes brings the proceedings down to earth and turns what is usually a mystical diversion into a touching family reunion.

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Scarlett Johansson stars with Liev Schreiber, Jessica Hecht and Michael Cristofer

Hollywood actress Scarlett Johansson has made her Broadway debut in a revival of Arthur Miller’s A View from the Bridge.

She received glowing reviews from critics for her role as 17-year-old orphan Catherine, who lives in 1950s Brooklyn with her aunt and uncle.

The play, which also stars Liev Schreiber and Jessica Hecht, runs at the Cort Theatre until 4 April.

In recent years Broadway’s stages have been littered with dim performances from bright screen stars, including Julia Roberts and Katie Holmes. Film actresses as famous as Scarlett Johansson tend to create their own discomfort zones onstage, defined by the mixed expectations of fans and skeptics. I was definitely aware of that zone when I saw Keira Knightley in The Misanthrope in London recently.

By comparison, Ms Johansson melts into her character so thoroughly that her nimbus of celebrity disappears. Her Catherine is a girl on the cusp of womanhood, feeling her way down familiar paths that have suddenly been shrouded in unfamiliar shadows.

The surprising achievement belongs to [Scarlett] Johansson, who proves to be capable of far more than collaborating in eyebrow-raising star casting. She’s got the broad vowels and engaging innocence for Catherine, and she makes you believe in the teenager’s flickering awareness of Eddie’s inappropriate attraction. And even after Catherine’s allegiance shifts to Rodolpho, the actress allows you to appreciate fully the pull she still feels toward Eddie, how, perhaps, that might have deepened Eddie’s confusion.

A new revival of A View From the Bridge features what could be this season’s most inspired piece of movie-star casting – though you may not immediately recognize the star.

While the ingenue in this production is certainly a beauty, her sweetly awkward air and thick Brooklyn accent hardly evoke a screen goddess. But she is, in fact, Scarlett Johansson – in a brunette wig – making an enchanting Broadway debut in Arthur Miller’s sobering fable.

Johansson disappears so completely into the role of Catherine, the plucky but naïve niece of a longshoreman, that you won’t stop to consider the qualities that make her distinctly suited to the part. Only afterward will you likely realize the actress’s youthful sensuality and capacity for good-natured goofiness constitute a perfect fit for this sheltered 17-year-old struggling to come to terms with her effect on men – her uncle, in particular.

Scarlett Johansson makes an assured and quite convincing stage debut opposite Liev Schreiber in the Broadway revival of Arthur Miller’s A View from the Bridge.

Johansson, looking less cosmeticised than she does onscreen, fits the bill well enough as an otherwise ordinary but appealingly young girl and comes across sincere and believable. Schreiber brings his considerable skill to conveying outward stolidity and uncomprehended inner turmoil, the dumb animal sliding into a wild one.

Scarlett Johansson, sporting a convincing Brooklyn accent, is touching as the young girl blossoming into womanhood. Although like most stage tyros she needs to do more work in terms of projection and stage presence, she more than holds her own opposite her dynamic co-star, which is saying something indeed.

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The novel Nation was published in the UK last year

Nation, at the National Theatre in London, is the latest stage adaptation of a work by celebrated British fantasy author Sir Terry Pratchett.

Set in the 1870s in an alternative reality, the play pitches Daphne, a shipwrecked young aristocrat, against Mau, a handsome South Pacific island native whose village has been wiped out by a tsunami.

Scripted by Mark Ravenhill and directed by Melly Still, the story muses over faith versus science but also nods to reality TV show I’m A Celebrity… Get Me Out of Here!

The National has staged some terrific Yuletide shows of late: powerful Coram Boy, imaginative War Horse and hugely inventive His Dark Materials.

Sad to report, then, that Mark Ravenhill’s adaptation of Terry Pratchett’s Nation doesn’t quite match their power, imagination or invention.

Science and reason are much feted, yet magic keeps resurfacing, whether in the form of a lady witchdoctor or ghostly "grandfathers" who hobble about in winding sheets using tusks for crutches.

Still, for all the confusion, the visual impact is considerable, and might be more so if there were more use of pretend birds, lurching pigs and other puppetry.

Mau and Daphne feel like crude counters in an exercise in politically correct sermonising about the superiority of science to religion which gets mixed, none too coherently, with sequences that depend on a sloppy cultural relativism.

Morally and emotionally, the drama is undernourished.

The tsunami seems to cure Mau of any fundamental belief in the patriarchal gods of his tribe.

Meanwhile, irritating Daphne progresses too smoothly from patronising tea ceremonies, via queasy cultural trials that are reminiscent of I’m A Celebrity… Get Me Out of Here!

Nation is spectacularly designed but altogether too designing.

For its Christmas family show, the Royal National Theatre has come up with a play containing death, witchdoctors, post-colonial guilt and some bad language.

With its place-faced gods of death, sharks, and dark birds of doom, this sometimes boring show, which is aimed at children aged ten or more, will merely give the little ones nightmares.

The whole thing seems horribly misconceived owing more to clumsy propaganda than Yuletide entertainment.

There are moments when the South Sea Islanders singing and dancing in their grass skirts resemble the kind of cabaret act you might encounter in a five star Hawaii hotel.

But there are some stunning underwater sequences and more importantly a script by the usually abrasive Ravenhill that captures Pratchett’s noble mixture of humour and human sympathy.

Some might complain that once again the NT is presenting a show that faces children with the concept of a cruel and godless universe, though the attack on religion is nothing like as strong as Philip Pullman’s in His Dark Materials.

But the combination of strong narrative, lively moral debate and a real sense of life and death dangers will hold adults and children in thrall.

It is all staged with a hectic panache. Sill and her co-designer, Mark Friend, have created a stage dominated by three translucent screens through which we glimpse floating corpses, swimming dolphins, predatory man-eaters.

Puppets, created by Yvonne Stone, represent a giant sow, bendy-limbed elders, even a growing baby.

Gary Carr and Emily Taaffe as Mau and Daphne disport themselves with great dignity and there is a nice study of a talking, walking parrot from Jason Thorpe.

Although it makes a spectacular island fling, it rarely achieves narrative coherence

Nation runs at the National Theatre until 28 March 2010.

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A stage version of The Black Album, Hanif Kureishi’s critically acclaimed second novel, has opened at the National Theatre on London’s South Bank.

Jonathan Bonnici plays a student who joins a Muslim brotherhood

Set in 1989, it tells of a young, British-born Pakistani man who finds himself torn between liberalism and fundamentalism.

Adapted by the author from his 1995 novel, the play shares its title with that of an unreleased but much-bootlegged Prince album from the period.

The production sees Kureishi return to the National’s Cottesloe auditorium, where his 1999 play Sleep with Me was also staged.

Some critics, however, have been left unimpressed by his look at the rise of radical Islam.

It lives on the page but it dies on the stage. That, alas, is the story of Hanif Kureishi’s second brilliant novel.

The National’s co-production with Tara Arts has its heart in the right place but its judgemental faculties absolutely nowhere.

How can something so absolutely boring and tritely old-fashioned in presentational terms claim to be widening the NT’s remit?

Jatinder Verma’s stunningly prosaic, badly cast and very badly designed production all looks like a retread of a best forgotten fringe play of about 1979.

Hanif Kureishi’s story about an Asian student from Kent choosing between Western liberalism and Muslim fundamentalism has only grown more pertinent.

The novel is still worth reading, but Kureishi’s stage adaptation is really pretty poor.

The sense of time and place that made the book compulsive has all but vanished here.

Only in a concluding set-piece, which links these events to the 7/7 bombings, does the evening take brief theatrical flight.

This is a busy, hectic affair that raises all kinds of issues about religious and political faith, fatwas and censorship and the purpose of art.

But, as so often with adaptations, you get the bones without the thickness of texture that was part of the original’s charm.

The stage version does scant justice to the book’s panoramic portrait of late-1980s London with its pubs, clubs and ecstasy-filled raves.

In a nutshell, one misses the heady exuberance of Kureishi’s descriptive writing.

In belatedly adapting his superb 1995 novel for the stage, Hanif Kureishi has done neither himself nor his subject matter many favours.

What was promised as a trenchant exploration of the roots of Islamic fundamentalism in our post-7/7 world ends up as a listless trudge through a series of tired scenes.

Jatinder Verma’s uninspired direction has the action shoehorned into a narrow set bounded by screens of video projections.

He’s not helped by the fact that Kureishi has failed to translate the comic astringency of his prose, and to bring the supporting characters to anything like fully realised life.

This staging of Kureishi’s novel, set in the year of the death threats against Salman Rushdie for writing The Satanic Verses, could so easily have been the cue for a fascinating investigation of the roots of radical Islam.

Instead what we got last night was a juvenile jaunt through a collection of implausible stereotypes spouting incoherent philosophy.

The dialogue is clunking, the scenes are rambling and the structure is haphazard.

It’s like watching Goodness Gracious Me mutating into a tasteless Indian version of The League of Gentlemen.

The Black Album is in repertoire at the National Theatre until 7 October and will then tour the country.