The Bridge Project — trans-Atlantic theatrical brainchild of Kevin Spacey and Sam Mendes — is once again in residence at the Old Vic. Following the success of last year’s Chekhov/Shakespeare lineup, a new company of American and English actors steps up, this time with an all-Shakespeare programme of As You Like It and The Tempest.

Billing the two plays as a ‘single journey’, Mendes has worked hard to justify their thematic pairing — harder perhaps than would be necessary if they were more natural companions. A viewing of The Tempest alone gave few clues as to connections, save an emphasis upon the father-daughter relationship common to both.

The first thing to say about Mendes’s Tempest is that I heard every word. Not without effort, and certainly not without concentration, but from my stalls seat every word was intelligible.

Much has been made of the understated mutterings of Stephen Dillane’s Prospero and of his ‘inaudible’ diction. His is not the self-possessed oratory we typically associate with Prospero, but the more inward speech of a man who valued a private life of study above the public responsibilities of his Dukedom. Volatile, by turns peevish and gleeful, Dillane’s Prospero is both bizarre and believable. Yet he does lack power; by starting off already broken and disenchanted, Dillane leaves himself only the subtlest of emotional journeys, one that jars with the carefully managed trajectory of Shakespeare’s verse.

What Mendes and Dillane do capture successfully, however, is the self-reflexive, self-regarding nature of this last of Shakespeare’s plays. Exploring the act of authorship itself, the characters and situations of The Tempest are constantly in flux, constantly subject to revision and the will of the magus or theatrical auteur himself. Using the simplest and most fluid of performing spaces, and relying on suggestion and meta-theatrical effect rather than full sets or props, Mendes forces each viewer to author his own experience, to imagine and create alongside Prospero.

With strong and more conventional support from Christian Camargo’s other-wordly Ariel and Ron Cephas Jones’s brutally earthy Caliban, the central trio of the play are well-balanced, making up for the severely edited text which leaves few of the other characters more than silhouettes.

Mendes’ Tempest is by no means a straightforward production. It has something of the experimental about it, a deliberate fluidity and imperfection that is both uncomfortable and interesting. If the promise of its smaller gestures is not quite fulfilled in the broader interpretational arc, it does not devalue the sudden fragments of insight it does yield.

If you struggle to hear what this unusual and intelligent production is saying, chances are you’re just not listening closely enough.

Performances continue at the Old Vic, in London, until August 21. Box office: Tel: 0844 8717628 (www.oldvictheatre.com).