The Winter’s Tale
Royal Shakespeare Theatre
Playing until 30 August
I think it’s always a mistake when you can only grasp some of what’s going on by reading the footnotes. It’s as if the work of art can’t work on its own. In this case some of what was happening escaped me while I was watching but after I had read the articles in the programme I could do some deciphering. Dramaturg Drew Lichtenberg explains that director Yael Farber attempted to knit the two halves of the play together by using Perdita as a symbol of Persephone whose Roman name which Shakespeare used was Proserpina (though why the stress was on the last syllable in the production went unexplained). Farber also saw Hermione as Proserpina’s mother Demeter. I don’t get why even now. There’s also stuff about female empowerment – sort of clear in parts in the production – but that article doesn’t seem to account for Paulina. The weird Geordie Autolycus in the production sees the director ditch some of what Shakespeare wrote and substitute it with Brecht. That at least explained why there was suddenly material I knew wasn’t in Shakespeare’s play.
Another idea gleaned from the programme was the combination of acting, dance and music. The only moment when we just got actors speaking was in the arraignment scene. All the rest of the time there was underlying, occasionally deafening, electronicy techno music. We attended what turned out to be the first preview as the original first preview was cancelled at the last moment. This was unfortunate because the balance of sound was faulty throughout. There was a lot, particularly at the beginning, that I couldn’t hear. Some of the actors’ projection was poor and Polixenes spoke so quickly that he was often unintelligible. Maybe these problems will get sorted out. But the often rumbling, pounding music eventually did my head in. There was a vast amount of swaying movement and dance – very competently done – but it felt superfluous.
I could see why the lighting was gloomy throughout. With the actors all in grey in Sicilia the partial lighting complemented the misery of the events taking place. But it was also rather gloomy during the very long sheep-shearing festival (the programme calls it the solstice festival; there was certainly nothing about sheep-shearing) and the only colour came in Perdita’s red dress. Maybe the lighting was meant to prefigure the mirroring way Polixenes turns into a mad Leontes and to remind the audience of the awfulness of male parental behaviour. It didn’t create the contrast which Shakespeare pens, though.
There were other things I didn’t understand. I didn’t grasp why Florizel doesn’t recognise his father but does recognise Camillo. And I didn’t appreciate the huge suspended globe (the moon? earth?) which became a clock with weirdly moving parts at one point and in an immensely complex lighting plot kept on shape and colour changing. The neon upstage strip light was horrid and, like the globe, distracting. I failed to grasp what the (changing?) significance of the partial moat was, even though it allowed Mamillius to sail his paper boat and the female dancers and others to paddle.
Although I didn’t get its purpose much of the time I did like the complex blocking which provided a range of pretty pictures and Madeline Appiah look wonderful in her spotlit white dress as the downstage centre statue at the end. Camillo, the moral centre of the play, was well played and well spoken by Raphael Sowole. The idea that Bertie Carvel’s Leontes was mad, irrational and hypocritical from the start cleverly got over the problem of his sudden eruption of jealousy. The suggestion that the tableaux of slow movement and mime were an indication of the sexual nature of Leontes’s jealousy was an interesting one as was the idea that Leontes deep down hated women (he can’t deal with Paulina but can tell Antigonus that he must have put her up to it). I also enjoyed the performances of two of the minor characters, Gavin Dunn’s Security2/Jailor and Ryan Duval’s Clown (Young Shepherd), whose postures and facial expressions were always good to watch. Chihiro Kawasaki danced beautifully. The two on stage musicians, Ailsa Mair Fox on cello and Tonny Shim on violin, blended perfectly with the actors although I couldn’t work out why they were on stage. In an incomprehensibly much expanded role Quinn Anderson was good as Mamillius. I sort of enjoyed the bear but I didn’t grasp why it was Hermione who put the bear’s head on just before the bear failed to pursue Antigonus to his exit.
It would be unfair to say this production was boring. It was brimming with ideas. But there were too many ideas for me, too many directors’ impositions on the play rather than dramatically effective interpretations of it.
As a postscript (not a footnote) I think that the trendy band-waggony days of age-blind, colour-blind and gender-blind productions at the RSC are over. Let’s hope so.