Jon Bausor’s versatile set is proving one of the star features of the RSC’s production of Shakespeare’s Shipwreck Trilogy. The wide, deep stage of the Royal Shakespeare Theatre is dominated throughout by a huge ‘wave’ of jagged wood planking curving upwards at the rear. In Twelfth Night a working lift delivers characters into the foyer of a down-at-heel hotel. In The Comedy of Errors, we are shown a sinister dockside, complete with an over-arching ship’s crane that occasionally lowers whole rooms, complete with occupants, into the action.

In The Tempest the crane’s beam transforms, above an island dotted with rocky outcrops, into the mast of a stricken ship — the vessel destroyed in the storm whipped up by Prospero. His cell is a large transparent plastic box — an appropriate prop for the conjurer he is — wherein are seen many strange wonders as the action proceeds.

Director David Farr maintains the tradition of the earlier two plays by giving us another pair of identical twins, not of Shakespeare’s but of his own devising. Of similar age, height and physiognomy and with identically cropped fair hair, Jonathan Slinger as Prospero and Sandy Grierson as Ariel are difficult to distinguish from each other (which cannot be said of the pair of Antipholuses or, more especially, of Sebastian and Viola-as-Cesario). Together amid the bleak island landscape in their ancient black suits, they look oddly reminiscent (deliberately so?) of Beckett’s Vladimir and Estragon.

Ariel’s humdrum appearance, though, makes it the more shocking (spoiler alert: skip to the next paragraph if you plan to see the play) when he is suddenly transformed into a pterodactyl-type creature that descends from the skies in a huge flash of light.

Though still with the Scottish accent heard from his Duke in The Comedy, Mr Grierson is not nearly so Gorbals-incomprehensible here; indeed, he speaks the poetry exceptionally well. Mr Slinger gives us once again the rich, lower-register tones of his hilarious Malvolio, this time inducing tears of sadness rather than laughter in his measured delivery of Prospero’s incomparably beautiful lines. This applies most especially in the famous speech in which he abjures his magic, widely interpreted, of course, as Shakespeare’s own farewell to his art.

With a pert and pretty Miranda in Emily Taffe and some relishable comedy from Felix Hayes and Bruce Mackinnon as Trinculo and Stephano, this is a top class Tempest.

Until October 7. Box office: 0844 800 1110 (www.rsc.org.uk).