During the first of Dominic Cooke's pair
of promenade productions of late Shakespeare dramas, more and more of
my notes came to consist of simple descriptions followed by ticks of
approval. During the second, I took few notes of any kind, normally an
indicator that I am thoroughly engrossed in the action.
Mike Britton's design strips the seating from the ground floor of the
Swan. A ramp curves up to one side of the gallery, a metal walkway
hangs beside the other. Some feet above what is normally the upstage
end, a playing area is canted several degrees from the horizontal. A
couple of rostra are trucked in occasionally, and that's it. The
groundlings of the audience mill about: sometimes part of the action,
as at the New Year ball which here begins
The Winter's Tale or the
sheep-shearing festival later on, sometimes getting out of the way
sharpish, as when Antigonus famously exits pursued by a bear. (I do so
like it when we get a decent bear: tick.)
I am belatedly coming round to the view that Anton Lesser is often just
too
actorly, but he gives his
all at moments of fevered emotion, and as Leontes he has plenty of
those: fevered jealousy about his wife Hermione, followed by fevered
repentance. Kate Fleetwood is an appealing Hermione (with a pair of
cheekbones you could use to engrave marble). Richard Katz is inspired
casting as the rogue Autolycus, and does a fine job though without ever
going supersonic as one might have hoped. But the evening belongs to
Linda Bassett as the plain-speaking, unshutuppable Paulina. She
combines a sharp tongue and a warm heart; in the closing "statue"
scene, when she declares to Leontes (and us), "It is required you do
awake your faith", I heard the gorgeous hush of several hundred people
doing just that.
Bassett does a turn as a twinset-wearing, cane-wielding Bawd (with Katz
as her minion, Boult) in the other episodic drama of wives and children
lost and found,
Pericles. As
in James Roose-Evans' versions several years ago, Cooke envisions
narrator Gower as a west African
griot,
but here all the city-states of the eastern Mediterranean are played as
African. Almost the first person we see is the incestuous tyrant
Antiochus, looking and sounding more than a little like Robert Mugabe.
As the orphaned/fostered/abducted/prostituted/rescued princess Marina,
Ony Uhiara largely avoids the tooth-rotting sweetness that often comes
with the role. Lucian Msamati is an engaging Pericles through all his
trials and tribulations, but we never forget here that Gower is
steering things. It can be a thankless role, often cut down to a "god
of the gaps", but Joseph Mydell renders him at once commanding and
playful. Only a few headline titles from the RSC's Complete Works
marathon will transfer to London, and these are not scheduled among
them. But to get the proper atmosphere, you need to see them on home
ground anyway.
Written for the Financial Times.