The Winter’s Tale
1999: Robin Lough

This is a film version of a performance by the Royal Shakespeare Company at the Barbican Theatre, London. It is not part of the more recent series of RSC Shakespeare plays, but it is consistent with its approaches.

Chief among those is probably the issue of setting. Some of this is understandable. The Winter’s Tale is, after all, not set in any particular real historical period. That is, we can reasonably infer that it is set in pagan antiquity, inasmuch as Leontes consults the oracle of Apollo at one point; at the same time, Hermione protests that her father was the emperor of Russia — and Russia had no emperors (or even existed as Russia) till well after the heyday of Apollo-worship. Apparently, then, in keeping with the general program of the Royal Shakespeare Company, this requires the play to be set in the late VIctorian or Edwardian period. The players are costumed in fancy suits and cravats, or long flowing lavender dresses, generally looking as if they were preparing to have their portraits painted by John Singer Sargent. The sets are aristocratic drawing rooms filled up with chaises longues and hand-cranked phonographs for furniture. The visual result is something like a play of Shakespeare as mediated by Bernard Shaw or Oscar Wilde. The embassy of Apollo from Delphi takes shape as something like a Russian orthodox priest, who brings in the oracle with a smoking thurible. All of this may be thought, I suppose, to express a certain timelessness; alternatively it conveys a sense of absurdism that expresses a cavalier disregard for the story, as if the impossibility of taking the narrative historically is confirmed and somehow improved by mixing two or three impossible elements with two or three others even more unlikely. Thus far the RSC. It’s been their stock in trade since the 1960s. It’s downright stodgy by now. Once one merely acknowledges this and gets it out of the way, the rest of the production can be evaluated more objectively.

Beyond the peculiarities of setting, the stagecraft is inventive and intriguing: a large quantity of cloth is used as the ceiling to the setting of the first part of the play; at the death of Mamillius and (apparently) of Hermione, it becomes a kind of depiction of a storm, and then it falls to the stage, where it becomes the abstract background of the rest of the play, including the bear who is so famously associated with the play by people who don't know it at all otherwise.

Ignoring the trappings, the performances are quite strong.

The most critical hurdle for any performance of The Winter’s Tale is almost certainly the role of Leontes. It’s a nearly impossible part to frame plausibly: the actor needs to go from zero to sixty, so to speak, in a remarkably short time, and then immediately indulge in a kind of emotional whiplash by reversing it all in a moment. Specifically, at the beginning of the play Leontes has no suspicion of his wife; but fifteen minutes in, without any really concrete motivation, he has worked himself into a frenzy of jealous rage. Then when Mamillius’ and Hermione’s deaths are reported, all his jealousy leaves him in a grand rush, and he becomes a model of contrition.

One way to handle this is to make the whole somewhat internalized and understated, keeping the mood swings less outwardly egregious; in this case, however, it becomes hard to motivate the trial of the queen and the king’s paranoid conviction that everyone, including the god Apollo, is conspiring to cheat and delude him. The other way is simply to blast through to a highly agitated delivery without really marking the gradations of feeling that brought him here. From this pinnacle of agitation, however, the sudden collapse of Leontes’ rage is still very difficult to manage believably. Personally I have never seen a performance that made the transition feel natural or wholly plausible, and I’m not sure I have any very rooted opinion about which course is the more practical.

For good or ill, it’s the high-energy path that Sher pursues. He is a forceful and convincing actor, and he accomplishes this breakneck emotional escalation with enough energy and passion that it seems at least possible. Slightly less believable is his deflation. His emotional arc at the end of the play, however, is genuinely affecting, and the final resolution is curiously (though also predictably) powerful. For all its architectural flaws, this is a great play.

Alexandra Gilbreath (Hermione) has considerable presence, though she seems a good deal more familiar than she might be (one is minded of Browning’s My Last Duchess); accordingly Leontes’ suspicions are perhaps a mite more plausible. The beginning of the play also makes a good deal of the fact that Hermione is pregnant: she is dancing, but then grows faint; she waddles around (as any real-world pregnant woman might well do) rather awkwardly. It’s entirely consistent with her condition, but it is also not something that most productions typically emphasize. Gilbreath is apparently of that peculiar breed of actors who believe that when one is speaking one must wag one’s head constantly from side to side, whether as a token of earnestness or something else. This is plausible at moments of peak emotional emphasis; when it accompanies every utterance, though, it becomes merely a disturbing affectation.

For reasons equally unclear, Mamillius is wheelchair-bound from the beginning. No reason is offered (which is fine); no excuse is offered for how this is consistent with the hopes articulated for him. He dies halfway through; one of the unresolved emotional problems of the play is the fact that he's apparently mostly forgotten by the end, while Hermione is being lamented all day every day.

The abortive festival and (maybe intended?) wedding at the midpoint of the play is exceedingly robust and frankly more than a little bawdy; parents and teachers are cautioned to preview it before showing it to younger students.

This is generally a useful and interesting performance of a lyrical and difficult play. As a single exposure for novice students, or younger students, I think I would recommend the BBC version. Much of the rest depends on taste.

Buy The Winter’s Tale from Amazon.