This is the second instalment of Sam Mendes’s Bridge Project, in which actors from both sides of the Atlantic combine not seamlessly but with a jagged charm. It arrives in London following appearances in New York, Hong Kong, Singapore and Paris.

Mendes has chosen to pair Shakespeare’s As You Like It and The Tempest. The plays are connected by their use of music and masque. Both examine what it means to be a lover, depict sibling rivalry, deal with forgiveness and enchantment, and see noble characters exposed to the delights and defects of rustic living.

Mendes interprets As You Like It — sometimes treated as if it’s a fairy-free A Midsummer Night’s Dream — as a wintry tale. He suggests that the journey towards love is arduous; while its rewards are apparent, they feel uncertain.

Orlando, played with brooding astringency by Christian Camargo, flees persecution at court and is followed by Rosalind, a quavery and at times eagerly kooky Juliet Rylance. They head into the forest of Arden, where they learn about the sweet uses of adversity. 

There are drifts of snow in the forest, and the characters wrap up to keep out the cold. The countryside may offer a kind of ideal commonwealth in contrast to the pressures of the city, but in Tom Piper’s design it’s a place buffeted by hardship, which only gradually sprouts verdure. The morose satirist haunting this imperfect Arcadia is Jaques, and Stephen Dillane conveys the role’s “humorous sadness” with panache. When he sings he’s a parody of Bob Dylan. His unorthodox cadences contribute significantly to a reading of the play that’s darker than usual and occasionally perverse, yet sends one back to the text with renewed curiosity.

Mendes’s take on The Tempest, played without an interval in a little over two hours, is restrained, even anaemic. It begins in a deliberately listless fashion, and seldom lives up to the romance and poetry of this tragicomedy of lost illusions.

Dillane is the magus Prospero, pensive on his desert island. Not a master of rhetoric, nor even an authority figure, he proves sceptical and watchful. His observations are dry. There’s intelligence here, but it’s hard to believe this shabby loafer could summon storm clouds or enact a grand scheme of re-conciliation, and when he turns up the volume his passion fails to convince.

There is telling work elsewhere, with Rylance’s Miranda bright and Ron Cephas Jones’s Caliban a slithering coil of depravity. More curious is Camargo’s Ariel, less like a skittish creature of the air than a member of the Addams Family. He’s a camp performance artist with a Gothic kink. 

Musically the production is satisfying. Yet for all the moments of ethereal dreaminess it suffers from a lack of power. Until the final scenes, we have little sense of much being at stake. It’s a thoughtful staging, bucking fashion in its lack of colonial symbolism, but there’s not enough heart and certainly not enough magic.
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