Cymbeline
Page 18
1. Ellen Terry, 1896, Lyceum. Her performance as Innogen was a portrayal that was to be as significant as Faucit’s in cementing the character as one of the greats.
Peggy Ashcroft first undertook the role in a 1932 production, again at the Old Vic, and reprised it to great acclaim in 1957 in Peter Hall’s Stratford production. Strangely—and in contrast to critical responses to Jefford’s youth—Faucit, Terry, and now Ashcroft had all enjoyed tremendous success in a part scarcely associated with mature actresses. Hall emphasized fairy-tale elements, uniting critics in praise of what they saw as a directorial strategy to knock the play into some kind of definite shape and measure up to the interest generated by Innogen, a sentiment that continued to dog criticism, as W. A. Darlington illustrated:
Imogen stands alone among Shakespeare’s heroines because the play in which she appears gives her hardly any support. It is a ramshackle, slung-together piece, a wild mixture of ancient Rome, prehistoric Britain and Renaissance Italy—a real director’s headache.42
Kenneth Tynan praised Hall’s
throwing over the whole production a sinister veil of faery, so that it resembles a Grimm fable transmuted by the Cocteau of La Belle et la Bête. He creates, in short, an ambience in which the ludicrous anomalies of the plot are believable and even loveable.43
The early 1970s saw two major North American stagings of the play, at the Shakespeare Festival at Stratford, Ontario, in 1970, and at the New York Shakespeare Festival the following year. Barry Kyle and John Barton’s 1974 RSC Stratford production (discussed in more detail below) revisited the fairy-tale vision of the play, while a more modern, self-conscious theatricality dominated Braham Murray’s 1984 outing of the play for the Royal Exchange, Manchester, starring Janet McTeer as Innogen and Hugh Quarshie in a rare but thoughtful doubling of parts:
2. Peter Hall’s production, Stratford, 1957. Kenneth Tynan praised Hall’s “throwing over the whole production a sinister veil of faery, so that it resembles a Grimm fable transmuted by the Cocteau of La Belle et la Bête.” Photo shows the Queen (Joan Miller) giving poison to Pisanio (Mark Dignam), Act 1 Scene 5.
while the viciousness of Cloten is quite beyond [Quarshie], the bemused nobility of Posthumus is not … Art Malik’s Iachimo is, like [Avril] Elgar’s Queen, disarmingly casual in villainy.44
Peter Hall bade farewell to his directorship of the National in 1988 with productions of three of Shakespeare’s late plays, Cymbeline, The Winter’s Tale, and The Tempest, with the former coming in for the loftiest praise of the three. His relationship with the play had clearly changed in the thirty years since he had last staged it:
Hall discovers in the play much more than the sumptuous romantic fairy-tale he directed in 1957. Instead it becomes a complex confrontation of virtue and vice, civility and degradation always shadowed by mortality: it is the Into the Woods of its day with everyone put on trial.45
Hall and his designer, Alison Chitty, felt the plays owed much of their atmosphere to the indoor Blackfriars theater for which he believed they were written, and adopted a broad Renaissance aesthetic, not “aimed at a historical reconstruction,”46 but rather “a boldly emblematic, self-contained universe”47 in which the imaginative dimensions of the three plays could be explored for possible consistencies and interrelationships. Geraldine James played Innogen, and the production tried hard to force audiences to rethink the entrenched image of the character as a saintly vision of feminine perfection in an otherwise slight or unworthy play:
although she did not disguise the fact that Innogen, in Hall’s phrase, is “a difficult girl” when she defies her father, bawls out Cloten, and does not conceal her impatience with Pisanio. With the experience of repeated performances, Geraldine James insisted further upon the “difficult” aspects of the part as well as the attractive ones, even to the point of risking alienating the audience in the first half.48
Michael Billington felt James “emerge[d] superbly as a tough, strong-jawed woman full of irony and anger,”49 also seeing the production’s more nuanced and mature vision of character in Basil Hendon’s Belarius, whom Billington praised for making the character “not some wayside preacher but a figure of golden-voiced stoicism.”50 This led, naturally, to an increased sense of the real dangers of the fragile psyches now seen behind what had for so long seemed cardboard cutout characters:
Ken Stott’s Cloten is not simply comic but a dangerous regal thug. Peter Woodward discovers in Posthumus an insecure neurotic who lapses into Leontes-like madness when he believes Innogen has betrayed him.51
In 2001 the play was staged at Shakespeare’s Globe in an experimental six-man version, with Mark Rylance playing both Cloten and Posthumus and Jane Arnfield as Innogen. Arnfield was noted to move “with a stylised grace: at one point she cartwheels with joy,”52 while Rylance brought superb comedy to his Cloten, playing it “like an early version of Caliban—or a Grizzly baby walking bandy-legged in uncomfortable nappies.”53 The complexity and psychological danger of both Cloten and Posthumus, so evident in Hall’s production, were here jettisoned in favor of a more straightforward hero/villain dichotomy, with Susannah Clapp actually referring to “the hero Posthumus,” played by Rylance as “Cloten’s graceful, muted counterpart, making you feel he’s whispering secrets in your ear.”54 Charles Spencer also noted of the design:
Simplicity rules. The cast all wear the same pyjama-like white costumes, there is no scenery, and much of the Globe’s gilded decoration has been covered. The cast also occasionally act as narrators, briefly setting the scene and describing who they are, so that the complex narrative is developed with satisfying clarity.55
That same year saw New York company Theatre for a New Audience bring the play to Stratford in a magnificent reimagining of the play, characterized by a “disciplined and generous-spirited eclecticism” which took in cowboys and kabuki.56 Rachel Kavanaugh staged a modern-dress, open-air version at Regent’s Park in 2005, the reviews somewhat reflective of a play that had been welcomed into the repertory now that critics had accepted its playful vacillation between reality and self-conscious fantasy:
The play’s politics and its fraught romantic entanglements are deftly caught, and Kavanaugh is responsive too to the changes of mood in a work that constantly juxtaposes the beautiful and the ugly, the real and the mythic.57
The play returned to the stage in 2007 in Declan Donnellan’s acclaimed Cheek by Jowl production, starring Tom Hiddleston, again doubling the roles of Posthumus and Cloten, and Jodie McNee as Innogen. It was another minimalist, modern-dress affair, though the company’s trademark conspicuous theatricality and informal relationship with the audience brought the play’s imaginative excesses vividly to life, with the production achieving “a spell-binding imaginative unity”58 that made perfect sense of a play too long marginalized by critics unsure what to do with it:
The handling of the potentially ridiculous crescendo of coincidences and reunions in the final scene is quite masterly. At each turn, we see people struggling to adjust to bewildering new realities and the mood at the end is expertly mixed, allowing a sense that some things cannot be resolved to complicate the atmosphere of wonder and spiritual transcendence.59
Cymbeline has been filmed a handful of times, first as an illustrated sequence of seven slides in the 1890s, followed by a twenty-two-minute silent film version of 1913 produced by the Thanhouser film company. It starred Florence La Badie as Innogen and James Cruze as Posthumus, and relied heavily on wordy exposition and “a striking number of screened letters in an attempt to clarify and explain the action.”60 A German film version followed in 1925, directed by Ludwig Berger, and the play was filmed again in Germany in 2000 as Cymbelin, directed by Dieter Dorn. But its major outing on celluloid in the twentieth century was in Elijah Moshinsky’s star-studded BBC version, with Helen Mirren as Innogen, Michael Pennington as Posthumus, Claire Bloom as the Queen, Robert Lindsay as Iachimo, and Richard Johnson as Cymbeline. It was in the main a low-budget, studio-bou
nd affair, as was the rest of the BBC series, but Moshinsky attempted to overcome these constraints by claustrophobically containing most of the action within windowless interior sets, in part a pragmatic decision because exteriors “look dreadful in the studio, so phoney,”61 though partly to suggest a stifling isolation within the court. Moshinsky also felt there was a tension between the domestic and the political within the play and wanted to emphasize the former, as well as engaging the audience visually with “Shakespeare’s world.” The sets were in fact high Renaissance in the style of interiors found in the works of the Dutch masters, which “not only look authentic on television but suit television’s conventional pressure towards domestication.”62 The production was well received, and Mirren’s performance was praised as being “as good as anything she has done on television”:63
The trouble with Imogen … is that she normally seems too good to be true in a world where nothing is what it seems, where the outward impression never matches the inner nature. [Mirren] overcomes this with what Moshinsky calls her “sexual voltage” and by showing her discovery, invisible even to her tempter Iachimo, that she is corruptible, open to seduction. She is far from the usual idea of a porcelain idol on a pedestal.64
Cymbeline is unlike any other play in the canon in that its many lives onstage, and the many critical responses these lives have engendered, have been as focused on justifying engagement with what seems like a baffling, inconsequential narrative as on the desire simply to reinterpret a complex artwork. Productions of the play—far less frequent than with the more central of Shakespeare’s works—have almost all been labors of love, while responses have often been characterized by trepidation on the part of critics perennially unsure how to approach it as a piece of drama. It is either a tangled mess of inconsequentiality; a fairy-tale world inhabited by unreal and unconvincing characters; or an ethereal and haunting masterwork played out by some of the most complex creations of Shakespeare’s career. What is certain is that this too-neglected masterpiece has, justly, enjoyed something of a renaissance in recent decades by directors willing to accept that the play needs no apology. Neither have the best productions striven to take the play “on its own terms,” as no healthy interpretation would presume to know what they are. Rather, acceptance of Cymbeline as a worthy and rewarding stage vehicle has ensured that directors, performers, reviewers, and audiences will keep returning to it with a sense of expectancy and wonder.
AT THE RSC
Cymbeline is commonly regarded as the strangest of Shakespeare’s plays. It reworks the themes of the other late romances, or lyrical dramas—loss and trial, recovery and reunion, forgiveness and redemption—with an extraordinary freedom, drawing eclectically on elements of myth, legend, and folktale and clothing them in some of his most highly developed verse. Set in ancient Britain during the early Roman Empire, it also wanders unashamedly into Renaissance Europe; categorized as a romance, it recklessly juxtaposes the tragic, the comic, and the grotesque; above all, it employs almost every plot device available to the dramatist. Its cast includes kidnapped infants, star-crossed lovers, a wicked stepmother, a deceived king, an oafish villain and a smooth one, ghosts and gods, while its plot involves attempted poisonings, plots against a princess’s honor and life, revenges, murders, battles, disguises, wild coincidences, and multiple reunions. To some it is a “glorious mishmash,”65 while others join Dr. Johnson in deploring its “unresisting imbecility.” What is certain is that it is an enticing play for a director, offering challenge and opportunity. There is no such thing as a “standard” production of Cymbeline; each director comes to the play afresh, to find a consistency in its diverse elements and to negotiate the minefield of its booby-trapped plot. There have been seven productions of the play for the RSC since 1961: four at the Royal Shakespeare Theatre, two at the Swan, and one at The Other Place.
Finding a Theme
1962, 1974, 1987, 1997—telling a story
When William Gaskill directed the play in 1962, he came fresh from directing Brecht’s The Caucasian Chalk Circle and the Brechtian influence was clear. The theatricality of the performance was made overt, the play’s story being performed to a group of scene shifters, who carried on appropriate scenery as required, with the stage lights up. Although quite unremarkable now, for audiences used to scene changes performed behind closed curtains or in a stage blackout, this was a radical departure, consistent with the extremes and improbabilities of the play’s plot. Don Chapman of the Oxford Mail noted, “the scene shifters very gently attempt to prepare us for the excesses of theatrical contrivance which are to come.”66 There was no Brechtian alienation in the actors’ performances, however, which were naturalistic and wholehearted.
Several subsequent productions adopted the storytelling approach: in the 1974 production, on an almost bare stage, John Barton, working with Barry Kyle and Clifford Williams, turned the play even more overtly into a piece of storytelling. Barton cut 820 lines from the text and developed the minor character of Cornelius into a narrator. Jeffery Dench in the role read out stage directions from the First Folio text and guided the audience through the story, much as Gower does in Pericles, preparing them for the abrupt shifts from horror to pathos to comedy. It was an approach welcomed by the critics: “[they] turned the unwieldy fable into moving and even magical theatrical experience”;67 “swift, romantic. Poetic and dashing”;68 “a production full of colour, fantasy and magic.”69
In 1987, Bill Alexander took the pared-down storytelling approach a step further in his studio production at The Other Place. Here, the actors gave a fireside telling of the tale within a circle of audience, and often engaged with the audience, sitting in spare seats among them. Andrew Rissik, in the Independent, eloquently described the mood of the production:
At The Other Place is a joyous and deeply affecting production. Bill Alexander has directed it as a glowing yeoman fairy-tale where the gracious dignity of historical legend gets an added lustre from homespun country wisdom and down-to-earth folklore … The lighting, done in burnished golds and autumnal reds, leaves the stage basking in sunny magic. Although the action darts with deft complexity between Machiavelli’s Italy, Celtic Britain and the Roman Empire, we are plainly somewhere in Warwickshire, in the bright, wooded landscape which always haunted Shakespeare’s imagination.70
In place of conventional sound effects, Ilona Sekacz wrote a vivid score, performed by the actors on instruments ranging from steel drums and wind chimes to the bared wires of an old piano.
In 1997, Adrian Noble followed John Barton in cutting a thousand lines of text and replacing the scene-setting dialogue between two Gentlemen in the first scene with a prologue which more clearly established the characters and situation. The prologue was spoken by the Soothsayer to the cast, again as a fireside tale. Noble sidestepped the mix of historical periods in the play by transferring the story to samurai Japan, finding a unifying setting which emphasized the play’s celebration of aristocratic and martial values, of blood and birth, as well as finding a new context for its magical qualities. Charles Spencer found this “the most rewarding production on the RSC’s main stage since the 1993 King Lear with Robert Stephens.”71
1979—splintered reality
David Jones’ production, rather than seeking to knit up the disparate strands of the play, allowed it to unravel with the disjointed realism of a dream. Rather than striving to smooth out the absurdities of plot, he allowed the comedy to become overt and run alongside the pathos. Critics tended to find his approach too anarchic: “I do not sense the imaginative unity that can hold the play together.”72
2001—“generous-hearted eclecticism or wilful zaniness?”
The New York–based company Theater for a New Audience brought a production to The Other Place that sharply divided both audiences and critics. Director Bartlett Sher made no attempt to find unity in the play’s disparate elements but rather reveled in its discontinuities, offering a “gorgeously multicultural” experience
73 or, alternatively, one which was “mischievously weird.”74 In Sher’s hands, Britain was Japan as depicted by Hokusai, a stiffly formal world in which the action was played out on a black and scarlet platform, but when Innogen and her attendant had battled their way through a swirling snowstorm with only their black parasols as weapons, they found that Milford Haven was not just in the west but in the Wild West, complete with Stetsons, drawls, and plaintive, plunking country music, which included a touching country version of “Fear no more the heat o’th’sun.”
At least two critics celebrated the chutzpah of the production’s irreverence: “winning chutzpah”75 wrote Paul Taylor, and “endearing chutzpah” Rachel Halliburton, who commented too that “there is something both wonderful and terrible about its bouncily irreverent way with one of Shakespeare’s lesser dramas.”76 “Kitsch” was a word critics reached for too, but while Dominic Cavendish complained that “it brings occidental and oriental influences into kitsch collision,”77 Paul Taylor declared that the move to the guitar-plunking West at the end of the first half, marked by a full company song, “Love Is Everywhere,” “joyfully transcends the kitsch with which it knowingly toys.” “This isn’t merely cheap stylistic promiscuity,” he argued, “but a disciplined and generous-hearted eclecticism. The company really understands what is at issue, morally and aesthetically, in the play.”78