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.