I was, as they say, privileged to take part in a ground-breaking production of The Tempest in last year's Edinburgh Festival Fringe in which the central role of Prospero was played by a female actor.

Now Hollywood has followed suit and I was eager to see the results. So were many of my colleagues but Edinburgh's cinemas made it difficult for them by scheduling very few screenings and almost all of those at times when good little boys and girls should be tucked up in their offices. Thus only two of us made it, a pensioner and a public servant.

I thoroughly enjoyed it. Apart from shifting Prospero's "such stuff as dreams are made on" speech to an earlier point in the story (where it makes a fine reflective soliloquy as Prospero looks fondly on the satisfactory conclusion of her matchmaking) and adding what seemed to me an unnecessary bit of back story involving a husband for Prospero, here called Prospera, the film resists the temptation to rewrite Shakespeare's play.

Not everyone speaks their lines as well as Helen Mirren. At times Caliban has an attack of the Jeff Bridges and much dialogue is blown away in the initial storm scene (perhaps that is intentional naturalism) but by and large only the most exigent Shakespearean verse devotee could have grounds for complaint.

I appreciated the efforts of all the actors to incarnate their characters. We had suitably romantic young lovers, a delightfully bumbling Gonzalo, nasty villains and loveable rogues plus a gentle sad eyed Ariel who is a shimmering animation bursting out of pools and flashing across the sky as a swarm of bees to do Prospera's bidding. That, the fire breathing black dogs and whirling zodiac sign filled heaven all reinforced for me the magic elements of the story though it seems that not all critics liked them.

The locations on the volcanic wastes of Hawaii gave superb cinematographic opportunities and absolutely appropriate settings for the tale. The final image of Prospera casting her magic rod into the sea was lovely but I'd have liked the long shots of the sailing ship being tossed around in the storm to have been more convincing.

My only major disappointment was that the film wasn't shown at the Cameo for half the price.