Yukio Ninagawa’s personal project to direct the complete dramatic works of Shakespeare continues with this production of the late romance Cymbeline, which visits as part of the World Shakespeare Festival. It contains no grand imagistic or thematic concepts, although it makes a couple of significant allusions: when the noblemen in Act One are discussing the merits of their respective beloveds, the back wall shows an illustration from the 11th-century romance novel The Tale Of Genji, and the final chain of resolutions and reconciliations takes place against the landmark not of a cedar tree but of the lone pine that survived the 2011 Tohoku earthquake. Otherwise, backdrops are more generally impressionistic and hang behind a bare stage (save for a large statue of the she-wolf suckling Romulus and Remus in the Roman scenes).
    
The production may have nearly three hours of playing time (not including the interval), but it proceeds with a combination of dreamlike fluidity and narrative clarity. This is a charitable way of saying that, if there are many subtleties and nuances of characterisation, they do not jump the linguistic gap. When we hear gruff but good-hearted gabbling, we know that the speaker is the comic servant Pisanio (Keita Oishi); guttural brooding, the deceived husband (though not by his wife) Posthumus Leonatus (Hiroshi Abe); youthful enthusiasm, the exiled cave-dwelling princes, and so on. Shinobu Otake as Imogen speaks in a girlish birdsong and is exceptionally petite, although a 54-year-old actress playing Imogen is pushing the bounds of suspension of disbelief. Masanobu Katsumura’s Cloten is not nearly as surly as the character is usually played; here the clowning note is uppermost, to the extent that Pisanio even has to help Cloten unsheathe his sword in order that he might be threatened with it. (Cloten’s decapitated end also irresistibly reminded me of a Lost Consonants cartoon about a sawn-off shogun.)
    
Surtitling Shakespeare is often problematic – too much text – but the version used here proves an odd combination of the poetic and the terse, like an overdone Reader’s Digest condensed text. Both narrative momentum and engagement are present in generous measure, but ultimately it rather feels as if, like Jupiter on his giant eagle in the deus ex machina scene, we are skimming over the dramatic landscape rather than digging into it.

Written for the Financial Times.