THE WINTER'S TALE
Silk Street Theatre, London EC2
Opened 6 April, 2017
***

You could look at a snapshot from any Cheek By Jowl production, and from the visual composition of the actors onstage you would instantly be able to grasp in detail the various relationships of the characters at that moment. Director Declan Donnellan gives the drama a physical clarity so that you never feel you need an explanation. And he almost always does this without compromising that drama. But only almost always.

This Winter’s Tale is unusually sombre when it shouldn’t be, and sometimes insufficiently so when it should. Orlando James’s King Leontes of Sicilia is clearly unstable from the get-go; his paranoid jealousy about his wife Hermione and best friend King Polixenes of Bohemia isn’t something he accelerates into from a standing start. But the physical realisation of his growing obsession renders the court scenes of the opening acts halting and ritualistic. This isn’t a production that draws us into the action; we need to be already invested in it. Likewise, the jolly rustic sheep-shearing festival in Bohemia after the interval is here a sober affair.

Bohemia is, apparently, Ireland: the shepherds who find Leontes’ abandoned daughter Perdita are Corkmen, Autolycus the trickster an Ulster compatriot of mine. Ryan Donaldson retains a bare minimum of his Shakespearean lines to fulfil this role: the rest of the time he’s working the audience, playing his guitar, impersonating Jeremy Kyle or a customs officer. I don’t buy either the need for or the efficacy of these or other cuts and reimaginings, especially when an earlier scene is retained which is so redundant that I don’t think I’ve ever seen it played before.

Most daringly, Donnellan cuts the final page or so of the play, concluding on a tableau of reconciliation and a silent scene of forgiveness from beyond the grave by Leontes’s young son Mamillius. However, this sequence, in which a supposed statue of the dead Hermione comes to life, is the most magical among Shakespeare’s late plays, even including The Tempest, and here once again we get only ritual. Joy Richardson as the honest Paulina declares at this moment “It is required you do awake your faith”; on the contrary, what’s required here is a sight more dreaming.

Written for the Financial Times.

Copyright © Ian Shuttleworth; all rights reserved.

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