Cymbeline

by William Shakespeare

  While audiences and many critics appreciated the production’s irreverence, energy, humor, and sheer zest, some missed the play’s finer lyrical and emotional moments. Many felt that it failed to respond to the play’s dreamlike quality and that the actors were not vocally equipped for the openhearted, high-flying lyricism which should surprise and delight us at times. They were “cruelly exposed and emotionally underpowered,”79 wrote Dominic Cavendish, and Benedict Nightingale, “Sher’s approach doesn’t call for finesse and doesn’t get it.”80 For Paul Taylor, however, there was “a delightful blend of robust jokiness and dreamy delicacy.”81

  3. Bartlett Sher production, Theatre for a New Audience, The Other Place, 2001. Cloten (Andrew Weems) with prop horse.

  2003—redemption through suffering

  At the Swan, Dominic Cooke gave the audience a version of the play which was bound together by the characters’ emotional truth. Michael Billington, commenting first on the impossibility of finding a realistic setting for the play, said of this production, “Cooke gives us an alternative Magic Flute-style universe in which pain and suffering lead to understanding.”82 Emma Fielding as Innogen, Daniel Evans as Posthumus, and Anton Lesser as a wicked but anguished Iachimo all used the intimacy of the Swan stage to draw the audience into their emotional worlds. The production played extravagantly, lifting an ironic eyebrow at the plot’s wilder excesses, while relishing them at the same time.

  2006—a fairy-tale world

  In 2006, for the Complete Works Festival, the RSC commissioned the small Cornwall-based Kneehigh company to perform their version of the play. Kneehigh is known for its radical updating of classic stories and for its use of music and physical theater. As adapted and directed by Emma Rice (who also played the Queen), the play lost most of the original language, which was replaced with consciously banal soap opera speech. Susanna Clapp commented, “It squeaks into the RSC’s year of Complete Works not as a performance of a written play but as a response to it.”83 While following the plot’s twists and turns, it offered “a pared-down, revved-up look at fractured families and forbidden love.”84 Emma Rice, writing in the program, said:

  But for me Cymbeline is a fairytale. It is about where we come from, who we are and how we find our way home. It is about family, but not a sentimental notion of family, no. This story tackles stepfamilies and dead parents, abduction and surrogate care. This is about families as we know them, damaged, secretive, surprising and frustrating.

  She went on to say, “I want this production to celebrate the child in all of us” (this was signaled in the program by photos of the actors as children). The production ended with Innogen, Posthumus, and Cymbeline’s sons climbing into single beds to be read a bedtime story.

  Like the 2001 production, this one polarized critics and audiences. Some welcomed it wholeheartedly: “Kneehigh has laid hands on [the play’s] unruly heart”;85 “a jubilantly free-wheeling rewrite”;86 “Cymbeline is a mad play and Kneehigh is a mad company. Plainly they were made for one another … [they] revel in the blackly comic clash of tones and anarchic knowingness.”87 Others felt that the losses from the rewriting were too great. Michael Billington found it “coarsely reductive,” disliked its “relentless jokiness,” and felt that “Rice substitutes sentimentality for real sentiment”;88 Fiona Mountford argued that “the humour sits uneasily with the strong surges of emotion and the real anguish of the separated lovers”;89 Sam Marlowe concluded that “While the production has abundant appeal, it lacks emotional weight.”90 Both Susannah Clapp of the Observer and Michael Billington of the Guardian found the abandoning of Shakespeare’s language a step too far: “ ‘Fear no more the heat of the sun’, the only Shakespeare passage of any length that is retained, makes you feel that the decision to slip away from Shakespeare’s verse was misguided”;91 “It ducks the real challenge of making Shakespeare live through his language.”92

  The Design Challenge

  For a designer, the play is wide open. The very contradictions which make it seem impossible on the page offer endless design possibilities.

  1962—a white box

  For Gaskill’s Brechtian production, René Allio designed a white-carpeted stage, with the back wall and wings draped with white netting. Onto this, stagehands brought symbolic pieces of scenery, while the actors were very simply dressed with only a minimum of indicative elements, such as cloaks, headdresses, beards, and wigs. When the characters reached Wales, a cluster of rocks on a swivel was introduced, which could be angled as cave, camp, or battlefield.

  1974 and 1987—fairy-tale country

  For John Barton’s production, with its introduction of a storyteller, designers John Napier, Martyn Bainbridge, and Sue Jenkinson designed “a Britain which has all the appearance of a Hans Andersen fairytale and costumes that would not have disgraced Titania’s glade.”93 As in the 1962 production, the set was, in fact, very simple—a sloping, carpeted stage onto which emblematic images were introduced. As in 1962, rocks were brought on for the Wales scenes, but Billington complained that Milford Haven “looked to me like an avant garde sculpture exhibition at the Hayward Gallery.”94 The costumes, too, were simple and emblematic: Sebastian Shaw’s “almost unreachably senile”95 Cymbeline carried the symbol of his entrapment by the Queen in the form of a cloak that was “like a gilded cobweb.”96

  In 1987, at The Other Place, the action was played on a bare arena stage, but one bathed in warm light to create a place at once homely and magical. Harriet Walter describes how the actors were given a range of costumes from stock to choose from.97 (This unusual approach to costume design was also adopted in the 2003 production—a sign of the anarchic power wielded by this play.) The result was largely a mix of Jacobean jerkins with medieval robes, enhancing the nostalgic Englishness of the production.

  1979—“not so much of no time as of every time”

  Christopher Morley’s costume designs supported the anarchic quality of David Jones’ production. Where earlier designers had gone for a timeless quality to match the play’s shifting time zones, Morley designed a kaleidoscope, ranging from a trailing robe for Cymbeline to Roman soldiers in something very like SS uniforms. The stage, as in previous productions, was bare until the introduction of “a couple of crags like giants’ teeth”98 when the action moved to Wales. Symbolic backdrops indicated Britain with a golden sun against a dark portcullis and Rome with fascistic black and silver.

  1997—the Japanese influence

  For Adrian Noble’s production, Anthony Ward designed a kabuki-style staging: the forestage at the RST was extended into the auditorium and entrances were made along walkways running from the stalls. The stage was a cerulean blue cube with a vast white cloth that could act as groundsheet, backdrop, or canopy. The actors wore high ponytails and stiffly pleated robes. The effect was one of “economy and grace.”99

  2003—Britons as barbarians

  At the Swan, Rae Smith designed a production in which the costumes were eclectic and symbolic. Not everyone was happy with them: Rhoda Koenig, in the Independent, complained that the design “piled artifice upon confusion”100 and the Sunday Times reviewer remarked that it was “as if Stella McCartney had tried to do a send-up of Vivienne Westwood and made a hash of it.”101 Although there was an overall design concept, the actors (as in the 1987 production) were given some choice in their costumes: during rehearsals, racks of costumes from stock were brought in for the actors to try out, and the costumes became symbolic of character. So, for example, Emma Fielding, as Innogen the rebel princess, wore a silky golden gown with heavy, scuffed walking boots (Fielding has said that she remembered, as a teenager, annoying her mother by accessorizing the pretty dresses she bought her with Doc Martens boots);102 Iachimo and the other Italians wore designer suits, ironically in pure white; the Britons all wore feathers; the more feathers, the higher their rank, so Cymbeline himself was elaborately feathered and the Queen wore a trailing cloak of peacock feathers, “a frightening and appropriately u
nlucky garment.”103 The feathers gave the Britons a barbaric air which was heightened by their stamping, chanting rituals. The audience was invited to see them as the Romans saw them—an uncivilized people ripe for colonization.

  4. Adrian Noble’s production, 1997. Image highlights the Japanese-influenced, kabuki-style staging. Photo shows Iachimo (Paul Freeman, right) making a wager with Posthumus (Damian Lewis) about Innogen’s virtue while the Spaniard (Rex Obano), Philario (David Glover), the Dutchman (Vincent Leigh), and the Frenchman (Rod Arthur) look on, Act 1 Scene 4.

  2006—an urban wasteland

  For Kneehigh’s production at the Swan, Michael Vale designed a stark, cagelike design, with clanging doors and an enclosed stage area above, which housed the band, and on which some interior scenes were played. At the opening of the play, hooded figures appeared in the half-light, fixing flowers, teddy bears, and messages to the cage bars—tokens of remembrance, we realized, for the little lost princes, kidnapped years before, establishing the brooding sense of loss which hovered over this production.

  Innogen’s Journey

  The role of Innogen lies at the heart of the play. It is with her separation, rejection, betrayal, loss, danger, recovery, and restoration that the audience must engage. Harriet Walter, who played the role in the 1987 production, says of her:

  Imogen is a coveted role. It is her range that chiefly appeals. In one evening an actress can play a bit of Desdemona, Juliet, Cordelia, Lady Anne, Rosalind, Cleopatra. In reading up about Imogen, I came across many descriptive adjectives: “divine,” “enchanting,” “virtuous” … To play a heroine one must look for her faults, her human weaknesses. If a flawed and vulnerable person is seen to be tested, to learn, to change, to make brave choices and to overcome the odds, this puts heroic achievement within our reach and gives us hope for humankind.104

  The most successful Innogens have found the character’s flaws as well as her heroism.

  1962—golden girl

  The young Vanessa Redgrave, fresh from a triumphant run as Rosalind in As You Like It, played Innogen and sent the (male) critics into poetic flourishes. Her performance was not universally admired: Charles Graves of the Scotsman felt that she was affected by playing Katherine in The Taming of the Shrew in the same season, and the reviewer in The Stage wrote, “I do not care greatly for Vanessa Redgrave’s Imogen. The gentle, tender, womanly yet firm-willed young wife demands greater maturity than she seems yet to possess … There is a touch of schoolgirlishness in her intensities and her agonies leave one unmoved.”105 These critics were, however, very much in the minority; the majority reached for golden images: “delightful, glowing, tender and despairing, crazed, angry and joyous by turns, every mood convincing”;106 “Miss Redgrave’s flaxen beauty”;107 “She gave Imogen such a heartfelt honesty and beauty that I swear that every man in the audience must have felt the urge to jump onto the stage to her rescue”;108 “Miss Redgrave, in aspect and tone, will be the Imogen-Fidele of her generation—the season’s daffodil”;109 “Vanessa Redgrave’s Imogen has a golden lustre”;110 “Vanessa Redgrave strode through the nightmare wonderland like a noble-voiced goddess”;111 “Her ardour, here in full billow, is now a ready gift for parodists, but as she ranges the peaks of love, joy, shock and anguish, the spectator is shaken into a recognition of true beauty and greatness.”112

  5. William Gaskill’s production, 1962. Vanessa Redgrave as Innogen gave the character “such a heartfelt honesty and beauty that I swear that every man in the audience must have felt the urge to jump onto the stage to her rescue.”

  1974—bold adventurer

  Susan Fleetwood was an Amazonian Innogen, less obviously vulnerable than some others, but more convincing than most in boy’s clothes. B. A. Young found her “a rather unromantic Imogen, square and undemonstrative,”113 but Irving Wardle wrote that she was “not obvious casting physically but utterly consistent to the limpid openness of the role, and superbly in control of its broken elegiac verse.”114 She also managed the difficult blend of pathos and comedy in Innogen’s role: “Her height and her bold, incisive style, ensure that the girl’s innocence is not maudlin … She is, at once, a creature lit from within by the lamp of her own integrity and, in her naivety, rather funny.”115

  1979—“mercurial humour”

  Judi Dench won critics’ and audiences’ hearts: “Judi Dench’s beautiful performance as the adorable Imogen, pure but passionate, sensitive but spirited, is reason enough for this year’s RSC production”;116 “Blonde, impassioned and comely, Miss Dench is a divine Imogen.”117 She dealt with the difficulty of the play’s potential for unintended comedy by investing her role with “a constant mercurial humour,”118 as though Imogen herself was aware of the absurdities in her situation. Billington commented, too, on a quality which has become a quintessential part of the Dench armory—the sudden switch to cutting coolness, “particularly fine is her treatment of Iachimo’s attempted seduction, regarding his recantation with the studied coolness of a hostess who has found a house guest walking off with the cutlery.”119

  1987—“fanatical ardour”

  Irving Wardle described Harriet Walter as “the RSC’s reigning specialist in fanatical ardour,”120 while Andrew Rissik encapsulated the general critical acclaim for her performance when he wrote, “Harriet Walter’s grave, passionate wide-eyed Imogen is an auburn-haired pre-Raphaelite princess, setting out with unswerving, headstrong ardour on the troublous adventure of love.”121 She herself says that she wanted to challenge the idealization of Imogen, describing her thus: “My image of Imogen was something of Boudicca and something of Fuchsia in Mervyn Peake’s Gormenghast—the smutty rebel child grown to wilful adult with Amazon potential.”122 She was defiantly independent and rebellious and her explosive relationship with her father was emphasized by the (genuine) slap on the jaw that David Bradley, as Cymbeline, gave her every night.

  6. Bill Alexander’s production, 1987. Harriet Walter describes her characterization of Innogen as “the smutty rebel child grown to wilful adult with Amazon potential.” She was also “defiantly independent and rebellious” and had an “explosive relationship with her father.” David Bradley as Cymbeline.

  1997—verbal musicality

  In the Japanese-inspired setting of Adrian Noble’s 1997 production, Joanne Pearce played a softer Innogen, a woman of deep sweetness with a seemingly limitless capacity for suffering. Using her considerable vocal range, she explored and exploited the possibilities offered by the language of the play. Charles Spencer commented, “Joanne Pearce plays her with a mixture of sense and sensuality that left the viewer besotted.”123

  2003—rebel princess

  Emma Fielding’s performance was universally praised. She played a strong, tough young woman: “Her Imogen may lack vulnerability but she radiantly personifies virtue without being merely ladylike.”124 She had “emotional candour, charm and courage.”125 Physically slight and fragile, she was all determination and will, and whether in her self-chosen costume of golden gown and boots or dressed as a boy, she had “a look of accidental glamour—an intense waif.”126

  2006—rejected child

  In Kneehigh’s updated production, Hayley Carmichael, in sandals and plaits, played Innogen, in Susanna Clapp’s words, “like a radiant seven-year-old.”127 Tiny and bewildered, “[her] beautifully impulsive Imogen feels the pain of rejection like a child does, without limit.”128

  Pure Malice: Iachimo

  Iachimo and the Queen are the drivers of the plot through their self-centered malice, but the most successful Iachimos have been those who suffered from the consciousness of their guilt. In 1962, Eric Porter’s Iachimo “insisted on being a richly rounded, living character”129 and “his treachery was undertaken with such grace that we almost forgave him”;130 in 1974, Ian Richardson, often the epitome of cold detachment, played Iachimo as a “bored Italian aristocrat who has no sooner slandered Imogen but he is stricken by grave remorse.”131 In 2003, Anton Lesser, i
n white designer suit, played “chilly arrogance” and “vicious lasciviousness”: his emergence from the trunk in Innogen’s bedroom—first a hand and then the rest of him—was performed with agonizing slowness in a scarcely breathing theater. However, his repentance was moving—in his appearance in the final scene he appeared to have shrunk physically with his loss of brio. Ben Kingsley, in 1979, was “gleefully villainous,”132 a suave Renaissance villain who committed to memory the details of Innogen’s bedroom “with the manic zeal of a private eye cracking a particularly difficult case,”133 while Donald Sumpter, in 1987, in the close intimacy of The Other Place, scrutinized the sleeping Innogen “with the cool fascination of a surgeon.”134 In 1997, Paul Freeman was a wolfishly grinning Iago-like villain, who invested the bedroom scene with “an amazing erotic charge.”135

  The Queen

  The Queen is given no name—like a fairy-tale wicked queen. She is pure malice. Patience Collier, in 1962, though “as tart as a basket of sloes,” was felt to be a little underpowered vocally but, in 1974, Sheila Allen was “like a psychedelic superstar who shops at Biba,”136 “a queen of night, whirling in multi-coloured plumage, reserving her most honeyed manner for those she plans to destroy”;137 in the 1997 kabuki-style production, Joanna McCallum, in ferocious conical hair, reminded Charles Spencer of Disney’s wicked queen in Snow White, and in Dominic Cooke’s 2003 production Ishia Bennison stalked the stage on stiletto heels, trailing her cloak of peacock feathers with its hundred spying eyes like a great, predatory bird. Heather Canning, in 1979, offered “only the fair face of this dissembling schemer”138 and, in keeping with the production’s willingness to embrace the play’s humorous elements, her evil was “cunningly transmuted into mischief,” so that, B. A. Young wrote, “I almost expected her to wink at me as she handed over the poison to Pisanio.”139 In 2006, Emma Rice, also adapter and director of Kneehigh’s production, played her as a fantasy nurse, raunchy and lethal, in black stockings and latex gloves. The Queen’s deadly potions became prescription drugs, administered with a syringe big enough to treat a horse, by means of which she kept Cymbeline in a zombielike state of dependence.