"What they say is real Shakespeare, with some reasonable trims and modifications. And with one notable exception, they speak the language beautifully, finding nuances of humor, feeling and fantasy packed into the prose and poetry of the script. Presiding over a motley, talented assembly is Helen Mirren as Prospera, the former duchess of Milan and Ms. Taymor’s most provocative and persuasive act of revision. Switching the gender of Prospero — an aging wizard who is also his author’s last and fondest alter ego — is more than a gimmick. When the character is a woman, a central relationship in the play, between the magician and her doted-on child, Miranda, sheds some of its traditional, patriarchal dynamic. Instead, a mother-daughter bond fraught with envy, protectiveness and identification blossoms into something newly rich and strange. … The Tempest is, perhaps above all, the portrait — the self-portrait — of an artist on the verge of saying farewell to his art. By abjuring her “rough magic,” burying her magician’s staff and drowning her book of spells, Prospera elects to live in a world without supernatural possibilities; having demonstrated the power of art, she accepts the limits of that power and forsakes hubris for humility, something Ms. Taymor seems unable to do."