There's something utterly mesmerizing about watching Shakespeare's spirits materialize on stage—those ethereal beings who seem to drift between the physical and metaphysical worlds with effortless grace. Having experienced Sigourney Weaver's commanding performance as Prospero at Theatre Royal Drury Lane, I'm reminded of why The Tempest remains one of Shakespeare's most haunting and visually spectacular works.

Shakespeare crafted his supernatural beings in The Tempest with an almost cinematic understanding of how to make the impossible seem tangible. Ariel, the chief spirit under Prospero's command, embodies this perfectly. When Prospero describes Ariel's abilities—"fly, To swim, to dive into the fire, to ride On the curl'd clouds"—we see a being unbound by the laws that govern mortal existence. This isn't just magical realism; it's poetry in motion.

What strikes me most powerfully is how these spirits move with "printless foot"—leaving no trace as they "chase the ebbing Neptune." This image of weightless, ghostly movement creates an otherworldly atmosphere that permeates the entire play. These aren't clunky stage effects; they're manifestations of pure imagination made visible.

Perhaps nowhere is this ethereal quality more hauntingly beautiful than in Ariel's famous song about Ferdinand's supposedly drowned father: "Full fathom five thy father lies; Of his bones are coral made; Those are pearls that were his eyes." Here, death itself becomes a kind of floating transformation—not an ending, but a "sea-change Into something rich and strange."

This vision of spirits dwelling beneath the waves, tended by sea-nymphs who "hourly ring his knell," creates one of literature's most evocative images of the afterlife. It's not heaven or hell, but something altogether more mysterious—a underwater realm where the dead continue to exist in transformed beauty.

Like almost all Shakespeare, this production left me feeling utterly wonderful, and Weaver's performance was no exception. Her delivery, while not traditionally Royal Shakespeare Company pristine, was in my opinion absolutely superb. What moved me most was her flow—the way she inhabited the verse with a slightly mismatched rhythm that, rather than jarring, created something startling and beautiful.

Her version didn't try to blend seamlessly into Shakespeare's established cadences. Instead, like an essential horn in a symphony, she added deliberate distortion that enhanced the blurring between worlds. This wasn't disturbing—it was revelatory. Her Prospero stood out precisely because she allowed her natural rhythms to dance with, rather than surrender to, the Bard's meter.

Watching her conjure these spirits felt like witnessing an ancient ritual conducted by someone who understood that magic doesn't always follow perfect rules. The slight discord in her delivery somehow amplified the otherworldly nature of the play itself. I found myself grounded in the familiar rhythms I love in Shakespeare's works, while simultaneously lifted higher by those ghostly, floating elements that seemed to respond to her unique interpretation.

In our age of digital effects and CGI spectacle, there's something profoundly moving about Shakespeare's spirits. They exist through language first—through Ariel's songs, Prospero's incantations, and the poetry that makes them real in our imagination. They remind us that the most powerful magic happens in the space between what we see and what we believe.

The spirits of The Tempest float because they represent the liminal—those spaces between sleeping and waking, between reality and dream, between the mortal world and whatever lies beyond. They're not just plot devices; they're embodiments of the play's deepest themes about transformation, forgiveness, and the power of art itself to create new realities.

Watching Weaver's Prospero finally release Ariel—"to the elements be free"—felt like witnessing not just the end of a magical contract, but the completion of a profound meditation on what it means to let go of power, to allow beauty to exist without possessing it.

The Tempest reminds us that some of the most powerful presences in our lives are the ones that float just beyond our grasp—like memory, like hope, like the ghostly figures that haunt our dreams and make them beautiful.

Watch my TikTok about these ethereal spirits and their floating, ghostly presence in The Tempest - it's been making waves across Shakespeare lovers everywhere! Sometimes the magic of live theatre and social media can create their own kind of sea-change.