Cover image: Jordan Gallagher and Angelique Malcolm in The Tempest. Credit Bruce Howard

Thirty years is a long time in any business, but never more so than in the unforgiving arena of the performing arts.

It is a huge credit to the professionalism, passion and dogged perseverance of Class Act Theatre’s Angelique Malcolm and her comrades in charms that this education-focused company has endured for so long.

Malcolm has been based in Melbourne for the past 10 years but founded Class Act in Perth in 1994 with the mission to make classic plays, especially those by the Bard, accessible to a wider audience and bring plays on the school curriculum to full-blooded life.

Led by Malcolm and often working with expatriate English theatre director Stephen Lee, Class Act quickly became WA’s largest unfunded theatre-in-education (TIE) company, providing paid opportunities to hundreds of local creatives: writers, directors, actors, composers, graphic artists and stage crew.

Since its inception, Class Act has produced over 45 different productions and given more than 8500 performances to an estimated one million students and thousands of adult theatre goers.

It’s a legacy of which Malcom is rightly proud. She started Class Act when she had a baby in her arms. Her daughter is now 32 and she feels it is time to say goodbye after a theatre career that also includes the self-devised TIE shows Bully Busters, Hooked, Cyber Busters, Girls Talk, Danger Stranger, the formation of WA’s first all-female theatre company HIVE in 2011 and a Performing Arts WA Award in 2014 for her contribution to the theatre industry.

Class Act takes its final bow with Shakespeare’s final play, The Tempest, which is often seen as the Bard drawing the curtain on his creative life as his protagonist Prospero gives up magical art and returns home from his enchanted island exile.

Class Act’s signature approach has been to demystify Shakespeare’s plays for new audiences with such reimagined productions as a hip-hop streetwise Romeo and Juliet, a cut-and-dagger corporate Macbeth and a psychedelic hippy-trippy Twelfth Night.

In this vein, The Tempest inhabits the cheesy retro universe of Lost in Space, Star Trek and Forbidden Planet Under the catchy tagline “Live Long and Prospero”. It’s a great fit, with this ebullient, entertaining production combining the popcorn-flick fun of those old sci-fi shows and the rollicking spirit of the rowdy Elizabethan playhouse where The Tempest premiered.

The 1950s film had pretty much ripped off The Tempest plotline anyway, with the marooned scientist Morbius and his daughter Altaira, an alien monster, technological wizardry, Robbie the Robot standing in for Prospero and Miranda, Caliban, the power of magic and the sprite Ariel who plays tricksy with the shipwrecked crew.

The Tempest has often been interpreted with dour, reverential respect over the years but director Stephen Lee, just as John Bell did with the comic turns in his final production for Bell Shakespeare in 2015, plays lightly with the comic opportunities in this outer-space escapade in the Subiaco venue’s studio theatre.

His cast are clearly enjoying themselves, especially Taran Knight and Laura Djanegara as the drunken, dopey shipmates Stephano and Trinculo who become false gods for the benighted Caliban (Lee standing in on this preview night for an unwell Ben Gill).

The audience gets an early sense of where this show is headed when the chaotic opening shipwreck scene is played out on a video screen with Natalie Louise’s Captain and crew throwing themselves from side to side like Captain Kirk on the USS Enterprise’s flight deck. I almost expected to hear Star Trek’s engineer Scottie break in with a shout: “I dannae if she can take any more, Captain!”

It’s all good fun, enhanced by the on-screen animation, B-movie sets, costuming and design work of Lee, Meredith Ford, Elisa von Perger, Henry Howard, Catherin Higgins and Yvette Drager Wetherilt. Ariel’s protean shift from a disembodied Siri/ HAL 9000 hybrid to a C-3PO-like droid delightfully played by Shirley Van Sanden was a particular highlight and enhanced the Shakespearean questions about the nature of humanity in the age of AI.

As to the challenging Shakespearean verse, there was no deference to any uniformity of speech as the multinational cast’s diverse accents (including the broadest ‘Strayan) provided a relaxed, accessible context for the mighty words and myriad themes of betrayal, revenge, enslavement, forgiveness and the power of imagination.

Malcolm (who plays the treacherous Antonio) and Lee have assembled a strong cast, led by Kim Parkhill channelling Helen Mirren’s Prospero, Matt Penny (Alonso), Jordan Gallagher (Sebastian) and Lis Hoffman (Gonzalo). Emily Jenkins (Miranda) and Calum Hughes (Ferdinand) shine as the couple demonstrating how the calming power of love can conquer even the most vengeful storm.

More power to that.

The Tempest runs at Subiaco Arts Centre until 13 September. Tickets.