The Theatre
" The Winter's Tale." By William Shakespeare. At the Old Vic.
Tux jealousy of Leontes is without motive; Bohemia has no coastline. Delphos is not an island ; nobody keeps queens in cold storage. Who cares ?
Who cares ? This is a winter's tale, an entertainment disowning reality in its title. If we are stinted of cause, we get full measure of effect. It is no good saying that Leontes has no reason to be jealous when he so obviously and interestingly is.
• The child who said, "I don't believe it," when he saw a giraffe spoilt his own pleasure at the spectacle. There are some things from which we have no right to expect plausibility. Among them are the plays of Shakespeare's later period.
That element of the preposterous which underlies the structure of The Winter's Tale does not mar the surface of the drama. The situations, however arbitrarily conceived, are handled with vigou rand precision. The Queen's plight, the !Mazy and later the remorse of Leontes, Paulina's loyalty, `the threats to the happiness of the lovers—all these things touch us as they are intended to. Each scene will rule our emotions for a little if we let it, each is capable of a certain pincer ; it would be pedantic to object that each has in fact usurped it.
Structurally the play is not so much shapeless as the wrong shape. Perdita's parentage is too slender, or perhaps too colourless, a thread to link the pastoral with the palatial ; among the cabbages we forget the kings. But what we lose in continuity we gain in variety. The characters, even when they are no more than puppets, have life and colour. Between Sicily and Bohemia, between the coney-catcher and the court official, between lust and sunshine, there is plenty to divert us. The Wintees Tale acts well.
It should, however, net a great deal better than it does at the Old Vie, where it suffers from a deplorably ineffectual production. The scenes in Bohemia are acted before curtains, whose unashamed drabness is venial because unobtrusive ; but Sicily is after Bnlieff—a long way after, and Florizel and Perdita mush lyrieize their passion in a setting whose in- sufferable quaintness exemplifies all too well the patronizing facetiousness of the interior decorators of nurseries. The clothes are terrible. And, weak as the machinery of the play is, it is not strengthened by the producer's disregard of the time-factor ; those sixteen years which have turned the King's head white have left scarcely a wrinkle on his attendants.
But these faults cannot obscure all the merits of the play, nor the excellence of much of the acting. Alike in torment and repose Mr. Malcolm Keen's Leontes is a well-judged, robust, and impressive performance. " The Emperor of Russia was my father," says Hennione ; and Miss Veronica Turleigh reveals a Tchekovian depth and a Tchekovian simplicity in the Queen's sufferings. This was a doomed lady from the first, and Miss Turleigh lent her a fine fatalistic dignity. Not all the maunderings of Victorian scholarship over Shakespeare's heroines have power to suggest a Perdita as peerless as Miss Peggy Asheroft's. She filled the stage with a quick and eager beauty, adroitly concealing the fact that Shakespeare had given her nothing else to fill it with. But the subtlest performance of all was Mr. Roger Livesey's Clown, a splendid and incalculable zany. Nor must we forget the Bear, who devoured Antigonus (off stage) with audible relish. It is for me a standing source of regret that Shakespeare never explored more fully the dramatic value of the larger carnivore ; particularly in relation to
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