“The entire text seemed simply to be relaxed, conversational, and modern. Ariel’s Full Fathom Five and Where the Bee Sucks and Stephano’s drunken songs - all faithfully lifted from the Folio text - seemed to have been written especially for the production, and fitted in perfectly alongside the songs written by the adaptors themselves.

“The result was that when whole passages of Shakespearean blank verse were introduced, usually as soliloquies, with the play’s pace slowing subtly to give them emphasis, they seemed astonishingly modern and accessible.”

Key Stage 3 students continue to find the Shakespeare 4 Kidz musical adaptation of The Tempest a perfect introduction to the story, themes, characters and relationships of Shakespeare’s final play.

Thomas Larque writing in Early Modern Literary Studies said this about the show: “The backbone of the production was effectively an abridgement and paraphrase of Shakespeare’s text into colloquial modern English, but this was combined with entirely new lines and songs, and peppered with phrases and longer passages of Shakespeare’s original unaltered blank verse and prose. The company showed such skill in integrating these three very different types of material that anybody who did not know Shakespeare’s play would have found it impossible to tell when or where the production slipped into and out of the Shakespearean original."