The Winter's Tale (23 page)
Authors: William Shakespeare
Granville-Barker was influenced by the work of William Poel's Elizabethan Stage Society, which attempted to re-create original performance conditions in his production of
Hamlet
in 1881. In New York
Northrop Ames directed a production of
The Winter's Tale
in similar conditions at the New Theatre in 1910. But it was Granville-Barker's
Winter's Tale
that crystallized the new production style. His most telling resource was a simple thrust stage:
2. The clean lines of modernity: Time introduces the audience to Perdita, the Old Shepherd, and Florizel in Harley Granville-Barker's 1912 production at the Savoy Theatre.
For the management of the action Mr. Barker has revived the Elizabethan plan with a difference. The stage has three planes, or steps, with two side-doors in the foreground, through which courtiers and messengers make their entrances and exits. There is only one interval, after the third act, to mark off the two periods of the story, and the act-drop occasionally descends upon the actors when they are speaking (this, by the way, is taken from the theatre of the Restoration), so that they begin a speech in mid-stage and finish it before the curtain. Set speeches they deliver at the very edge of the stage (there are no footlights, but search-lamps converging on the stage from the
dress-circle), addressing them directly to the audience, the proper method, of course, of the old “platform.” The rustics dance and sing to pipe and tabor; there is no orchestra.
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Those critics who liked the production admired the performances. John Palmer called Henry Ainley's Leontes “the finest piece of Shakespearian acting I have yet seen” and was equally enthusiastic about Lillah McCarthy's Hermione.
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Not everyone was convinced, however, and the production closed after six weeks: “Mr Granville Barker, in a distressful striving after the artistic, has achieved that mingling of discordant, ill-related elements, that impossible jangling of different keys, which can never be far removed from vulgarity.”
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Peter Brook's 1951 production at the Phoenix Theatre achieved popular and critical success, despite continued misgivings about the play itself:
But for all its structural shortcomings
The Winter's Tale
has eminence, charm, of an indefinably old-fashioned kind, and Mr Peter Brook's production discovers in it a certain strength as well. Most of this stems from Mr Gielgud's very fine performance as Leontes, whose jealousy is so unquestionably real and terrible that we are not worried by the fact that its causes are flimsy and its consequences far-fetched. He is well partnered by Miss Diana Wynyard's handsome and long-suffering Hermione and Miss Flora Robson's staunch Paulina (though I am not sure that Shakespeare did not see this officious lady as a slightly more comic character than Miss Robson makes her).
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Brook was clearly influenced by Barker's ideas, but theater historian Dennis Bartholomeusz concludes that while “Barker was very much in play” in terms of the simple set and fluid performance style, “Barker's other important principle of intimacy, dictated by the thrust-stage, was not a part of Brook's design. The production was not as radical in its sweep as Granville-Barker's, nor quite as original.”
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In recent years the play has regained some of its early popularity,
and those issues that rendered it problematic for theater audiences attuned to a realist mode of representation seem less daunting to those willing to suspend their disbelief and, as required by Paulina, to awake their poetic and theatrical faith. Most recent productions have nevertheless been performed under the aegis of the subsidized theaters such as the Royal Shakespeare Company and the Royal National Theatre. RSC productions are discussed in detail below, while the most significant production at the National has been Nicholas Hytner's modern dress version in 2001 with Alex Jennings as Leontes, Claire Skinner as Hermione, and Deborah Findlay as Paulina. A play as ever of two halves, it had critics mixed in their views as to which worked better. Most were impressed by Hytner's inventive updating: “His contrasting versions of contemporary life suggest Establishment and drop-out, old order and New Age, Windsor and Spencer.”
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Sicilia became a “sleek monochrome box ⦠peopled by sycophants in grey suits,” while “Bohemia is an explosion of colour: Glastonbury-cum-Woodstock, with no morris-dance romping or unfunny clowns, no yokels and no wenches.”
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All were agreed that “Findlay, always subtle and always substantial, gives the outstanding performance of the production: she's never a shrew or simply a visionary.”
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The part of Paulina has again and again proved to be one of the most rewarding female roles in Shakespeare.
Perhaps the most admired production of modern times was that of Annabel Arden for Simon McBurney's Complicite company, who specialize in vivid storytelling through highly physical theater. The production opened in January 1992 at the Seymour Theatre Centre, Sydney, then was played in Hong Kong and toured the UK before a run at London's Lyric Hammersmith.
Daily Telegraph
critic Charles Spencer caught its dazzling quality in a suitably effervescent review:
Complicite's use of movement and body language brilliantly illuminates the text, and almost every scene has a vitality that forces you to consider the play afresh.
The play begins with disco music, popping champagne corks and manic games of blind-man's-buff, yet it quickly becomes clear that the party spirit is not shared by Leontes.
Simon McBurney brings a fidgety, sweaty intensity to the role of the troubled king, and in one superb scene he is discovered standing on top of a wardrobe, gazing miserably down on the happy innocents beneath him as his heart is gnawed by destructive jealousy.
Annabel Arden's production captures harrowingly the full trauma of the first half of the play, as Leontes creates a winter world of death and despair. The physical and emotional violence McBurney brings to the tormented king as he rages among the toys in his young son's nursery has the sickening impact of a kick in the solar plexus.
In the second half Complicite let their hair down in their own inimitable way. The scenes in Bohemia have an infectious, anarchic energy, with a vintage comic performance from Marcello Magni as that normally tedious rogue Autolycus. Jettisoning Shakespeare, and talking in a ludicrous mixture of Italian and heavily accented English, he comes on as a hilarious parody of a libidinous Latin, pinching handbags from the audience, flogging dodgy cassette tapes and offering healing laughter after all the grief of the earlier acts.
In a haunting, slow-motion procession with the nine-strong cast changing into costumes of mourning as they march, the production takes us back to Leontes's tragic court. There is a stillness in these final scenes which forms a fine contrast with the earlier manic activity, a real sense of wonder as the dead come to life and the divided family are miraculously reunited. The moment when Leontes embraces the “statue” of his wife Hermione and cries “She's warm” achieves an astonishing depth of emotion.
The cast double and treble their roles (even McBurney plays the clown as well as Leontes), and all make memorable contributions. There must be a special praise, however, for Kathryn Hunter, who is not so much an actress as a human chameleon. In the course of the show she plays a young child (Mamillius), a passionate middle-aged woman (Paulina) and a comic old man (the shepherd) with a verisimilitude that beggars belief.
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The Winter's Tale
has not proved itself a play with wide international appeal, but there have been a number of ambitious modern productions in the United States and elsewhere. Ingmar Bergman took his Royal Dramatic Theatre of Sweden's production to the Brooklyn Academy of Music in 1995. It was set in the early nineteenth century in a Swedish manor house and played as a play-within-a-play put on by the guests at a young woman's birthday party. It contained:
not one but two bears, one brown, the other white ⦠The brown bear is a comic interpolation. The white bear is the beast that figures in Shakespeare's best-known stage direction: “Exit pursued by a bear.” This bear, being polar, also more or less locates Mr. Bergman's vision of Shakespeare's settings of Sicily and Bohemia. They're now far closer to the chill of the Arctic Circle than to the reviving warmth of the Mediterranean sun. This may be why the play's dark first half ⦠now has such emotional impact that the light-hearted conclusion seems more of a dream than Shakespeare possibly intended.
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Brian Kulick directed a version for New York's Public Theater in 2000 to mixed reviews. Most critics concluded that the production was “most successful at the breezy comic business that fills much of the latter half of the play.”
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Barry Edelstein's Off-Broadway production attempted to update the play but, as one critic pointed out, “The kind of topsy-turvy worlds these plays evoke is not easy to reconcile with business suits and modern technology,” but concluding: “The damage here comes not from Edelstein's often handsome stage images, which are underscored with elegance by Michael Torke's superb jazz-tinged piano score and the subtle lighting of Jane Cox, but from the drab delivery of some of Shakespeare's most challenging verse, which drains too much of the color from this exceedingly colorful play.”
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Barbara Gaines' production for her Chicago Shakespeare Theater is discussed in “The Director's Cut,” below.
There have been a number of films of
The Winter's Tale
, including a 1910 silent version. Several stage productions have been filmed,
including Frank Dunlop's with Laurence Harvey as Leontes in 1968 and Gregory Doran's 1997â98 RSC production with Antony Sher, Alexandra Gilbreath, and Estelle Kohler. Jane Howell directed the play for BBC television in 1981 with Jeremy Kemp as Leontes. This was one of the more successful productions in the BBC series, as film historian Michael Brooke suggests:
One of the most daringly stylised productions of the entire project, its stripped-down approach to design and staging working particularly well on television ⦠Production designer Don Homfray (who had already moved towards a minimalist approach with Rodney Bennett's production of
Hamlet
the previous year) reduced the sets to a couple of cones, a tree (which Howell said was a deliberate homage to Samuel Beckett's similarly spartan
Waiting for Godot
) and a plain wedge-shaped background with a passage cut through the centre, and the changing seasons were conveyed by shifts in the colour of the sets and lighting (stark white for winter, green and fertile for spring).
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The style proved an imaginative transposition of the world of the play to the medium of the small screen. At the time of writing, there is yet to be a modern big screen adaptation, though one directed by Waris Hussein, with Dougray Scott as Leontes, is due for release in 2009.
The Winter's Tale
âa “Problem Play”?
Writing in 1958, two years before the launch of the RSC, Nevill Coghill still felt it necessary to defend six continuing areas of concern regarding the play, among them the suddenness of Leontes' jealousy, the bear, Time, and the statue scene.
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To these could be added the “broken-backed” nature of the play, split between two very different worlds and eras, which features so regularly in criticism and reviews. To today's reviewers and audiences, these concerns are no longer seen as dramaturgical failings. Nevertheless, how each
director decides to address these challenges, together with their choice of period and place, and the balance between public and personal, continues to a great extent to define each production.
Popular as the play now is in its own right,
The Winter's Tale
is often performed as part of a themed season. In 1960 it gained status as the last in the chronological sequence of six Shakespearean comedies that launched the RSC. Later productions, however, continue to occur in the context of Shakespeare's late plays (1969, 2002, 2006); the 1984 community tour coupled it more interestingly with Arthur Miller's
The Crucible
, with which it has strong thematic and dramaturgical parallels.
The twentieth-century productions of
The Winter's Tale
at Stratford were all on the main stage: the scale and intensity of the emotions, the extrovert energy of the sheep-shearing festival, and the very size of the cast enabled the play to fill the large Royal Shakespeare Theatre (RST) space comfortably, while the non-naturalism of the various “problematic” sequences makes a clear separation between audience and action attractive. However, in 1984 the RSC toured a small-scale production to non-theater venues; this very successfully explored the possibilities inherent in a staging that was intimate, as well as involving a promenading audience surrounding and taking part in the action. These principles were reapplied in both the twenty-first-century productions: Matthew Warchus' Roundhouse production made significant use of onstage promenaders to contribute to the visual picture, even though these had to be cut when the production transferred to the RST; Dominic Cooke's production for the intimate neo-Elizabethan Swan Theatre in 2006 went further, converting the whole of the stalls to a playing and promenading space, and although designer and director were unable to resist incorporating a mini proscenium arch acting space into the design, the key scenes were made public and played among the audience.
