Theatre 2
The Winter's Tale (Royal Shakespeare Theatre, Stratford)
Crucial timing
Patrick Carnegy
No play better bears out Dr Johnson's view that Shakespeare's 'tragedy seems to be his skill, his comedy to be his instinct'. Whether a timely infusion of rustic jollity can turn tragedy to comedy is a matter cen- tral to every serious staging of The Winter's Tale.
The director Gregory Doran and a strong cast led by Antony Sher as the sud- denly deranged tyrant, Leontes, have the measure of this troubling play, troubling because its utopian resolution, with cast- out wives and children restored to life and love, hovers on a knife-edge of credulity. Divine grace may suffice in a Christian mystery play, buf that was hardly Shake- speare's pitch. Sher's focused energy and intensity create an entirely plausible tyrant, as terrifying in his rage as pathetic in his breakdown and suffering. Doran's updating the action to a period roughly spanning the first world war needs no further excuse than the play's own prodigal sport with time. The ballads hawked by Autolycus translated nicely into shellac 78s. The Delphic oracle's judgment is delivered in clouds of incense by a Greek Archimandrite — same revelation, differ- ent messenger. Leontes of Sicilia and Polix- enes of Bohemia are modern monarchs: they parade in ermine regalia but cannot wait to slip into their man-about-town suits, seize a whisky from the salver and a Sobranie from the box.
Robert Jones's set keeps their antique ancestry in view. The sharply receding per- spective is that of the courtly theatre of the Baroque — a broad antechamber flanked by blocks of panelled doors. A billowing cloth doubles as ceiling or angry sky, peaks up into a mountain range, rears up bear- like to devour Antigonus and shrouds the figure of Time.
Doran treats the onset of Leontes's psy- chotic jealousy of his wife's innocent friendship with his best-friend Polixenes not as a bolt from the blue but as an every- day phenomenon — Leontes steps forward to alert the audience to the, certainty of cuckoldry in its midst. An atmosphere of distrust and suspicion is established from the very beginning in a tableau of the royal trio flanked by whispering courtiers — pre- sumably voices already echoing in Leontes's skull. And this is fair because the one sure thing is that the king's delusion springs from within, its trigger Polixenes's dancing with the heavily pregnant Hermione to a wind-up gramophone. In a touch characteristic of this finely detailed Production, Leontes mistakes Hermione's little gasp of pain at the first intimation of her labour as a sigh of love. When Sher pounces the stage is taut with danger. His swift, flailing movements, his stabbing finger do not exorcise the turmoil Within, nor can his stillnesses contain it. When Hermione kneels to him in her anguish this Leontes is racked by a split- second hesitation of doubt before plunging himself and his victims into the abyss. As Hermione, Alexandra Gilbreath's plea for clemency would have melted stone. Her eloquence only exacerbated Leontes's reac- tion to the oracle's vindication of her and sentence upon himself. With the news of his young son's death all passion is spent as the walls close in on his now huddled despair. By the interval you were caught up in a great performance. Make what you will of Time's 16-year intermission, the winter of Leontes's purga- torio yields to the summer paradiso of the sheep-shearing festival, to which Autoly- ls's fleecings may doubtless be reckoned legitimate contribution. Doran plays this as a hilarious romp, wildly entertaining in Parts but perhaps not wholly successful in grafting the scion of rustic exuberance on to the root stock of the rumbling concerns Polixenes regal succession. The disguised -rolixenes (Ken Bones), spying on his son's infatuation with Perdita, is expert in the cross-pollination of orchids but erupts as dangerously as Leontes at the prospect of this human coupling. Strange that Emily Bruni, quite perfect in playing Leontes's son Mamillius as a sickly cripple in the first half, wasn't as convincing as Perdita. Her flighty pixie was afflicted with the Irish twang that's all the rage with the RSC at the moment, failing to hit the mark as `something greater than herself, Too noble for this place'.
Ian Hughes as Autolycus was a tirelessly sprightly performer with an engaging line in falsetto singing. He managed nothing better than getting the strapping Young Shepherd's clothing off his back and on to his own diminutive frame without its owner's feeling a fly (a beautifully deadpan performance by Christopher Brand). But Hughes's manic energy couldn't quite sus- tain the interminable encores of Autoly- cus's comic routines. There's more edge, more true drama in the role than is here discovered.
Of course it doesn't help that Shake- speare keeps putting off the moment when he must return to assuage his tragedy. The statue of Hermione that Paulina (Estelle Kohler) unveils stands in the same trellised dock in which the queen had been so viciously humiliated, now transformed into a sacred shrine aglow with candles. Whether her return to life is a miracle or a ruse devised between Paulina and Hermione is left an open question. Our own reward is the sight of Sher's tears of reunion with his wife and long-lost daugh- ter, the sound of his valediction. Momen- tarily you share the illusion that the performance had pulled off the play's impossible attempt to conjure a forgiveness for the unforgivable, a reconciliation of youth with age, of Dionysian madness with the saving grace of Apollo.
Twenty-six years of age and still bringing your money home to launder!'
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