Abstract
Originally scheduled to open the Royal Shakespeare Company's (RSC) 2020 Stratford season, Erica Whyman's production of The Winter's Tale, like Simon Godwin's National Theatre Romeo and Juliet, was eventually forced by the sustained Covid-19 theatre closures to reinvent itself for television. However, while Godwin reimagined his shortened version of Romeo specifically for television viewers, Whyman presented The Winter's Tale as it would have been staged in the theatre, but without an audience. This left the actors unnecessarily over-projecting to reach the limits of a vast but empty auditorium – an entirely understandable consequence of the production's having been fully rehearsed for its projected opening in the Royal Shakespeare Theatre.
The stories of how both these productions were ultimately created are chronicles of determination and perseverance, of hopes raised and then dashed, of dedication and hard work in adverse circumstances. In neither case was the final production a compromise, which makes it essential, I think, that my review of The Winter's Tale doesn't patronise it by taking the line: ‘Considering the circumstances, it was really good’. (I have suffered myself from the dreaded ‘Considering’: ‘Considering it was performed by amateurs …’.) I can only report on how the production came across to me, a longstanding fan of the play, watching it alone at home on my vintage flat-screen TV. I am fully conscious that my response may have been quite different had I seen it in its intended form, live in the theatre amidst the buzz of an audience eager to be gripped, entertained and finally moved to tears by the play's magical, transcendent denouement.
That said, The Winter's Tale is a challenging play – something I realised even as a student studying it for A Level in 1969 – and poses particular problems in bringing it to life onstage. While updating it can intensify the vivid psychodrama that unfolds in Sicilia, there is no escaping the difficulty of finding an effective modern equivalent for the archaic pastoral conventions of the Bohemian scenes. The RSC's promotional materials, including its April 2021 members’ News Update, promised a time-span ‘from the 1953 coronation to the [1969] moon landings’ – though neither of these events was referenced in the production – in ‘a world where the ghosts of fascist Europe collide with horrors reminiscent of The Handmaid's Tale’. In the event, however, viewers were presented with a generalised dystopian society which, far from ‘washing up on a joyful seashore’, worked out its narrative of seasonal regeneration against an orange-lit cyclorama framed by ugly scaffolding.
As so often in productions of this recalcitrant masterpiece, the Sicilian scenes came off best. In Tom Piper's design, with its backdrop of high, fretworked windows, Leontes's court was like one of those ‘magic-eye’ illusions, shifting from palace to prison with only the slightest adjustment of focus. Presiding initially over a court resplendent in stylish evening-dress, Joseph Kloska's Leontes was visibly and audibly jealous from the start, his movements fretful, his tone irritable, his growing anger redirected as a furious aside to the viewer: ‘At my request he would not[!!]’ (1.2.89). Yet his petulant outbursts were oddly comic, his voice breaking into a squeaky croak in its upper register, his body literally all over the place – hands, feet, legs in a constant flurry of twitchy movement. I desperately needed an audience to guide my response here; was Kloska deliberately playing for comedy, or simply failing to convey the character's shocking obsession? The answer, I think, was revealed as the actor strengthened his voice, broadened his emotional range and relaxed both physically and vocally, redirecting my initial amusement into a kind of horrified sympathy. In the trial scene – shown being filmed live for TV, with snatches of the broadcast shared with us in 1950s black-and-white – his opening address was delivered with calm, quiet deliberation. As he listened to Hermione's passionate self-defence he already seemed to be relenting, realising he’d got it wrong, before veering back into self-righteous fury when his pride was dented by the Oracle's condemnation of his behaviour. In this part of the play, Kloska's Leontes was both original and effective, I thought.
Elsewhere in Sicilia there were many strong performances, helping to flesh out the personal and political tensions underlying the court. As Hermione, Kemi-Bo Jacobs was at first unexpectedly brittle, and her attempts to persuade Polixenes to stay longer seemed insincere – indicating, perhaps, the character's hesitancy in trying to read her husband's unpredictable temperament and do what she thinks he wants. Later, I thought her response to Leontes's accusations, delivered with righteous anger rather than quiet dignity, made her less sympathetic than usual, though in the trial scene she was as powerfully moving as the text demands. Andrew French's well-spoken Polixenes was natural, genial and likeable, while Colm Gormley's Irish Antigonus was, for once, utterly real – a down-to-earth embodiment of rock-solid integrity. Best of all were Ben Caplan's Camillo and Amanda Hadingue's Paulina, partly because both managed to moderate their performances for the camera, rather than playing to the upper reaches of the unoccupied auditorium. Hadingue, in particular, brought Paulina convincingly to life as a no-nonsense middle-manager with a warm heart, who speaks her mind and is not going to be messed around by any man, king or not, but whose judgment proves to be (almost) fatally flawed in leaving the baby with its deranged father.
The play's transition scene (3.3) proved ominous for all the wrong reasons. Antigonus's deliberately misleading soliloquy, apparently confirming Hermione's death and suggesting Polixenes was indeed the father of her child, was almost drowned by the music and sound effects; a line of figures emerged dimly through the rear-stage grille, morphing into a kind of communal Tai Chi bear, working up to a synchronised ‘tearing him to pieces’ mime; and Hermione's ‘ghost’ snatched down a length of fluttering white drapery to cover the child. The Shepherdess and her son made their various discoveries without managing to highlight that astonishing key-change – ‘thou met'st with things dying, I with things newborn’ (3.3.110–11) – which marks the play's seasonal shift from winter to spring. With no interval, the acting company immediately returned to the stage as Time, the splitting up of whose rhyming lines (4.1.1–32) made it difficult to follow this crucial narrative update. Nor did things improve when, in the following scene, Polixenes and Camillo were required to plot their spying expedition on Florizel while sheltering under umbrellas and being watered from cans by actors on stepladders.
In 1969, my A-level study of the play was enormously enhanced by seeing Trevor Nunn's seminal RSC production, graced by Judi Dench's risky but exhilarating doubling as Hermione and Perdita. Nunn memorably reimagined the Bohemian sheep-shearing shenanigans as a rock musical, unmistakably inspired by Hair. As some of us had seen this earlier in the year on a school trip – surprisingly, given my school's stuffy traditionalism – we were able to appreciate Nunn's skill in applying its life-affirming energy to Shakespeare's pale and undramatic pastoral. In view of Whyman's apparent setting of this scene in 1969, she might have done better to consult the promptbook of Nunn's production and restaged his version of it for our entertainment. As it was, Bohemia here was something of a jumbled mess. To get the worst out of the way first: the festivities were being filmed by one of the shepherds and, as in the trial scene, we saw snatches of the result, with characters playing up to the camera. At one point – and I can still hardly believe this – Autolycus addressed us through the camera lens with the following words: ‘Here's a very interesting fact for you: Shakespeare lived through a pandemic and it was during that time he wrote King Lear’. I have to confess that after this I retreated briefly from the fray to fetch myself a restorative bowl of cornflakes from the kitchen.
While I have no wish to dwell on the mishandled Bohemian scenes – and, to be fair, other reviewers enjoyed them – I shall attempt to apportion praise where I can to the beleaguered actors. Anne Odeke, in different circumstances, might have made an enjoyable, Vespa-riding Autolycus, particularly with her strong singing voice – though this was wasted on Isobel Waller-Bridge's lame but loud pastiches of 1960s rock music. I can imagine Zoe Lambert, too, giving a delightful and moving rendition of the gender-switched Old Shepherd, and she worked sympathetically with the D/deaf actor William Grint, who gave energetic and entertaining life to her son. I thought it a mistake, though, to fragment the delivery of his lines between speech, mime, British Sign Language (BSL), onscreen subtitles, ‘translation’ by other actors and, in his first scene with Autolycus (4.3.31–117), sharing them with the show's other talented D/deaf actor, Bea Webster. With so much going on at once, I found it difficult to grasp much of Shakespeare's often tedious rustic comedy. Finally, Georgia Landers and Assad Zaman as Perdita and Florizel made a personable and attractive pair of youthful lovers (but why do so many young actors seem afraid of giving full lyrical and emotional value to poetic dialogue?), while Caplan's Camillo and French's now rather melodramatic Polixenes battled their way gamely through their ridiculous disguises.
And so, with enormous relief, to return to Sicilia where, after 16 years, nobody seemed to have aged much and Leontes, though repentant, was very far from the sick, broken man of theatre tradition. Interestingly, his closest courtiers were now women: Paulina, Cleomines [sic] and Dion; the latter two had earlier, on their mission to Delphos, been imaginatively presented as post-war successors to the pioneering British explorer Gertrude Bell, celebrated in Whyman's 2019 production of Hannah Khalil's A Museum in Baghdad. If the final scene didn't quite exert its usual magic, I think this is again attributable to the performative context. In the theatre, there is always that communal hush, that gasp of wonder at the miracle of resurrection. Together we suspend our disbelief and accept the validity of the fairytale. This time, alone with my television, I was more interested in some revealing close-ups. First, there was the restored Hermione, her face registering a complex mix of emotions, including uncertainty as to whether she could ever forgive her husband. Then, there were Camillo and Paulina, never previously onstage together, randomly cast by Leontes as prospective marriage partners. For once, it was possible to see what they made of this: shocked at first, rejecting the idea, and then realising the rightness of Leontes's typically whimsical proclamation. To my surprise, I found their coming together the most moving moment in the production.