Difficult Moments
The headless corpse
When Imogen wakes up from a drug-induced coma to find, as she thinks, the headless corpse of Posthumus beside her, she is given a hand grenade of a line: “O Posthumus, alas, / Where is thy head?” The dilemma for director and actress is whether to suppress the line’s potential for comedy or submit to it. Of Vanessa Redgrave, the Birmingham Mail critic wrote, “She goes full out for the horror … She might perhaps have brought this off completely had the corpse not been so gruesomely thrust at us—but how cleverly she buries the most embarrassing line in the folds of its tunic”;140 Milton Shulman commented that she “not only beautifully portrayed unsullied innocence but managed to make believable her affection for a headless corpse”;141 and the Times critic, “Her uncompromising playing … was utterly satisfying in its truthfulness.”142 Susan Fleetwood “surmounted” the moment, while Judi Dench was presented with a horrifically realistic blood-soaked corpse, which defied laughter. Of Harriet Walter, Michael Billington wrote, “she conquers the appallingly difficult moment when she awakes next to a headless corpse and proceeds to daub her face with its blood.”143 Emma Fielding deftly combined horror and comedy and Cloten’s head appeared on a pole later, swung around by its bearer so that he appeared to be following the conversation. In 2006, Hayley Carmichael exploited the comic, as the production did in general.
The battle
The lengthy, messy battle between the Britons and the Romans in Act 5, in which several characters change sides, is almost impossible to make dramatic and even more impossible to follow. Directors have to find a strategy to manage these scenes and most eschew realism for symbolism. In William Gaskill’s 1962 production, the British and Roman forces performed a balletic fight, and in John Barton’s 1974 storytelling production in which Jeffery Dench, as Cornelius, became a narrator figure, he read out the account of the battle while it was acted in dumb show behind him. In David Jones’ 1979 production, three figures whirling huge flags represented the action, while Bill Alexander’s 1987 studio production simply used strobe lighting, with painfully loud metallic drumming, and in 1997, Japanese staves and banners were used, while Cymbeline sat enthroned above the action. In 2006, in the Kneehigh production which emphasized the child inside the adult, the battle was played out on a giant gameboard.
7. David Jones’ production, 1979. Judi Dench as Innogen was presented with a horrifically realistic blood-soaked corpse, which defied laughter.
8. John Barton’s production, 1974. The descent of Jupiter in this production was inside a great golden shell, which split open to reveal him.
The descent of Jupiter
When Shakespeare wrote the descent of Jupiter as deus ex machina in Act 5, he was exploiting, as he did in writing the descending goddesses in The Tempest, the technical possibilities of his company’s new theater, the Blackfriars, to which they moved in 1608. For his contemporary audiences, the ability to fly a deity from the heavens was impressive enough, but for blasé modern audiences directors and designers have to look further for the magical coup de théâtre that the moment requires. In 1962, Jupiter descended on a golden eagle; in 1974, he was inside a great golden shell, which split open to reveal him; in 1979, he was represented by a golden globe mounted on an eagle. At The Other Place, in 1987, Irving Wardle complained, “we get all the build-up for a masque, only to be fobbed off with the voice of Jupiter instead of the god’s descent on an eagle.”144 Michael Billington had complained about the 1997 production, where the kabuki model was abandoned at this point, and Jupiter descended on a hydraulic platform.145 In 2003, the descent of Jupiter was highly extravagant in sight and sound, accompanied by a barrage of lighting effects and music almost painfully loud. By contrast, in 2001 one of the two bow-tied “observers” who had wandered through Theatre for a New Audience’s production spoke Jupiter’s lines, while in 2006 Kneehigh portrayed Jupiter as a military general.
THE DIRECTOR’S CUT: INTERVIEWS WITH DOMINIC COOKE AND EMMA RICE
Dominic Cooke was born in London in 1966, and studied at Warwick University, taking up his first job in television as a runner shortly after graduating. He founded his own theater company, Pan Optic, which he ran for two years before starting work as an assistant director for the RSC, as well as freelance director, in the early 1990s. In 1996 he joined the Royal Court as an assistant director under Stephen Daldry, returning to the RSC in 2003 to direct the production of Cymbeline he discusses here. Other successes with the company include Macbeth (2004), As You Like It (2005), promenade productions of The Winter’s Tale and Pericles for the RSC’s Complete Works season in 2006, and, the same year, a production of The Crucible, for which he won the Olivier Award for Best Director. He has been the artistic director of the Royal Court theater since 2006.
Emma Rice was born in Nottingham in 1968 and studied drama at London’s Guildhall and then at the Gardzienice Theatre Association, Poland. She joined Kneehigh, directing her first show for the company, The Red Shoes, in 2002, for which she won the TMA Theatre Award for Best Director. She has been artistic director at Kneehigh, who are based in Cornwall, since 2005. Her other directorial successes include The Wooden Frock (2004) and The Bacchae (2005), both of which won the TMA Award for Best Touring Production; Tristan and Yseult (2006); Cymbeline, which she brought to Stratford as part of the RSC’s Complete Works season, also in 2006; Don John, also performed at the RSC in 2008; and Brief Encounter, for which she was nominated for the Olivier Award for Best Director in 2009.
Why do you think the play’s called Cymbeline?
Cooke: Innogen and Posthumus are the central roles, but the play tells the story of how Cymbeline becomes legitimately restored to power. I think that’s the reason for its title.
Rice: I’m always looking for clues in the source material I choose, and the title is one of them. The fact that Shakespeare called the play Cymbeline means that it was Cymbeline that he wanted to cast as the main character. In fact Cymbeline is quite a minor character in simple text and action terms, but what’s really interesting is his narrative curve. It’s an unusual story structure as we meet Cymbeline when he has lost almost all of his power—he is spiritually at rock bottom. He flounders and sinks further into confusion but then finds the strength to ascend and find dignity, empathy, and forgiveness by the end of the play. The title is always a clue.
Cymbeline has caused much critical consternation arising from an inability to decide what kind of play it is—fairy tale, tragicomedy, etc. What kind of play is it to you, or does such categorization not really matter?
Cooke: Critics, especially literary critics, are very fond of fitting things into preexisting genres, but there are some plays or works of art that defy existing categories or create their own. The style of Cymbeline is drawn from the different styles that Shakespeare has used throughout his career. You get elements of the classic Shakespearean comedy, with girls dressed as boys, mistaken identity, and romance; you get the military conflict of the Roman plays; you get the political intrigue of a history play; you get some of the horror of a play like Titus Andronicus; and you get the sense of loss of tragedy. So, in our production we created a patchwork visual style that reflected this.
Rice: Those categorizations don’t matter in the slightest. It’s simply a story. Agreed, it is a very peculiar story, but it is a story nonetheless. I think it has a fairy-tale structure: the going into the woods, getting lost in the wilderness, and finally finding a way through to hope. It has a male fairy-tale structure of going to war and surviving conflict, woven with a female fairy-tale structure of finding your identity having been outcast. In many ways, it’s about lots of people finding their way home, which is a recurrent fairy-tale theme.
Traditionally, the play’s three main plots have been identified as the marriage/wager plot (Innogen/Posthumus/Iachimo/Cloten), the dynastic plot (Guiderius and Arviragus, the future rulers of Britain), and the nations plot (involving the Roman invasion of Britain). What was yo
ur approach to marrying all these elements, and did you see one as being more significant or appealing than the others?
Cooke: The idea of death, or grief, as a transformative force is a feature of all of Shakespeare’s late plays and it is, for me, the central idea of Cymbeline. By experiencing loss and grief all the characters learn the true value of relationships they previously took for granted. In the play, grief becomes a potential gateway to a form of spiritual rebirth. At the beginning of the play Innogen and Posthumus are out of balance. They are headstrong, hyperbolic, and trapped in a rigid sense of youthful certainty. In many ways their decision to marry is an act of rebellion—they have little sense of what the commitment of marriage really means. By the end of the play you feel that they are at the start of a marriage that could last and grow, that their love has depth and maturity. I think this sense of evolution through loss is also true of Cymbeline himself, who loses his daughter, and of Guiderius and Arviragus. They are exposed to loss through the “death” of Fidele and experience profound new feelings, expressed in some of the most beautiful language Shakespeare ever wrote. This is the gateway to a new maturity and on some psychic level prepares them to be restored back to the royal family.
Rice: Without a doubt some are easier to do. The Posthumus story is an easy plot for us to enjoy and get to grips with as it’s the simplest. We all understand jealousy and idiocy! The boys in the woods is a challenging story line and, at times, hard to get your head around because it can feel unbelievable. In fact it’s a very powerful motor in the play, challenging the nature of family, friendship, and society. Certainly the hardest story line for a modern audience is what is going on with Rome. It’s not a well-known part of our history and, to be honest, it’s not that interesting. It’s the hardest plot to reveal, and in my production and adaptation we used it primarily as a metaphor for war. We didn’t try to explain the conflict, which is such ancient history that it’s very hard to connect to. It really became about what happens to our characters if they go through something as major, and nondomestic, as war. The trick to making all these narrative strands weave together is to find a way of them all inhabiting the same world. We created a world that was brutal and full of conflict, one in which women were treated as objects and possessions and where friends turned against each other in war and peace. It was a fearful and barren world which ultimately presented a place for hope, truth, and reconciliation to bloom.
Although we know Iachimo is lying about sleeping with Innogen, critics have argued for a kind of sexual conquest in the “trunk” scene, which many also consider the finest in the play. What are your memories about that scene in your productions and how did you want it to read to your audiences?
Cooke: It’s clear from the text that Iachimo kisses Innogen and we didn’t feel the need to take it any further than that. The kiss, and his presence in her bedroom as she sleeps, is uninvited, and this seems like a violation in itself. We staged the scene with Innogen asleep on cushions on the floor which represented her bed, with her head facing downstage. The trunk was upstage of her, and when Iachimo came out of the trunk, which he did very slowly, he stood upstage looking down at her. This enhanced the sense of her vulnerability in the face of his predatory sexual desire.
Rice: I often find Shakespeare very difficult, and I found Cymbeline a particularly dense and confusing play. And yet, in the middle of it is this brilliant scene—“man wrestles with unconscious girl.” It’s bloody interesting and very entertaining. It’s a little bit sinister, a little bit funny, a little bit titillating, and very visual. There’s everything from Carry On to Footballers’ Wives in there. It’s brilliant. My memory is of relief when we came to work on that scene because we had such great fun with it. We used no words at all because the actions spoke quite loudly enough. Hayley Carmichael, who created the role of Innogen, marvelously went for a wee halfway through it and then came back in and went back to sleep, and all the while there was Iachimo trying to get hold of the bracelet. That’s what I call a scene!
9. Dominic Cooke’s production, 2003. Anton Lesser as Iachimo. “We staged the scene with Innogen asleep on cushions on the floor which represented her bed, with her head facing downstage … [Iachimo] stood upstage looking down at her. This enhanced the sense of her vulnerability in the face of his predatory sexual desire.”
Do I think there was any sort of sexual conquest? Absolutely not! That’s the male fantasy talking. Innogen had nothing to do with it. What’s interesting is whether men see consent as part of the conquest, or whether it is just the act itself that counts. There is a strong theme throughout the play about consciousness and consent, with Innogen being drugged by Cloten later in the narrative. So I’m fairly dismissive of the question in terms of the critics, but in terms of the play it’s a brilliant scene and a very contemporary issue. I referred to Rohypnol directly in the script to highlight the relevance and reality of this behavior.
How did you depict the relationship—and reconciliation—between Posthumus and Innogen?
Cooke: There’s a complexity to Innogen and Posthumus’ reconciliation at the end of the play. We played it as a hard-won moment. They approached each other tentatively and made slow physical contact as if neither assumed that they would be accepted by the other. They eventually held each other, but it felt like the beginning of something new and uncharted and therefore slightly scary. It felt like they were meeting each other for the first time as adults, rather than as headstrong teenagers, and negotiating a new relationship together which is exciting but frightening. We made the final image of the play a wedding witnessed by Jupiter, a genuine commitment rather than the hurried, clandestine union that precedes the play.
Rice: The whole fifth act I did as a dreamscape. It was the characters emerging after war, but as a metaphor, not as a reality. It was as if the world had exploded and they all had to re-find themselves and each other. There is a line in the play—“he lives.” I really felt that this encapsulated what they all felt; they were still alive and they were noticing the life in others. So I saw the reconciliation as the very peaceful coming together of two people who had journeyed from childhood into adulthood and survived. But, significantly, they made this journey separately. This is not a romantic story; Innogen and Posthumus spend so little time together in the play that we don’t invest in their relationship like we would in Romeo and Juliet. We’re told they love each other, and we’re told they are married. However, I cut the marriage in this production because I wanted them to have not quite made that commitment. I wanted them to think they were ready to make that decision, and then in true fairy-tale form, to only really discover the reality of a lifelong love after passing the tests that life threw at them. I wanted it to be like the coming together of two freshly born adults, who may or may not make it as a couple. There was a very gentle, dreamlike quality, but not sentimental at all.
Some have argued that the Wales scenes are chiefly of the domain of the “wild man” rather than the shepherd, and therefore they are not of the pastoral mode in the same way as As You Like It or A Midsummer Night’s Dream. How did you envisage and stage them?
Cooke: The world of Wales in the play has an innocence and connects with a sense of escape from the falseness and sophistication of city life. In this way it reflects plays like As You Like It, although Shakespeare’s treatment of the pastoral is never sentimental. He frequently presents nature as cruel. The Forest of Arden in As You Like It, for example, is partly a place of recuperation and escape, but Orlando escapes being bitten by a snake there only to be attacked by a lion. The Wales of Cymbeline is equally a dangerous place, hostile to outsiders—Guiderius kills Cloten virtually on sight. In our design we created a contrast between the three worlds of the play through costume and props—the set stayed the same throughout. It was a spare, stripped-back stage with the usual floor of the Swan Theatre stacked up against the back wall. There was a trapdoor in the stage that Guiderius and Arviragus crawled out of. But within that theatrica
l setting there was also a sense of realism in the way that the characters lived in the wild—realistic hunting knives and bows and arrows were used.
Rice: These scenes were the hardest in the whole show. The reason for this was not necessarily Shakespeare. I think, in the UK, that theater tends to be a very middle-class pursuit, and middle-class people trying to look rough and wild can just look ridiculous. We laughed more than is possible trying to make these scenes real. In spite of this, I think the concept for them was very strong. I wanted the two lost children to live on the streets and to be the human fallout of conflict. I didn’t want these scenes to be in a cave, I didn’t feel that had any resonance for us. I wanted to create a world that was challenging and recognizable. We got there in the end, but it was hard to marry the epic language with such a social realism. We wrestled with these ideas and managed to create an edgy environment, with old mattresses and spray cans. We struggled to make it believable and often lost confidence, but then a really magic thing happened. When we took the show to Colombia, the audience had an amazing reaction. They completely understood the story we were trying to tell and had a genuine reference to it. That really inspired us to believe in that choice. It was going to Colombia that made us believe that this was not only strong, but very important.
How did you represent Rome and the Roman gods in your productions?
Cooke: We went with the idea that the gods were real to the characters in the play. So we created a shrine to Jupiter, with an eagle’s head, above the audience. Whenever someone spoke to the gods, which they did frequently, they addressed the shrine. This made the characters’ relationship to the gods a concrete one. In the play, Rome is characterized as a hybrid of the machiavellian intrigue of the Italian Renaissance and the efficiency of the Roman army. So we created a world which was part Ancient Rome—Roman armor and sandals in the military sections—with contemporary Rome, very fashion conscious and with a strong sense of display. Iachimo and most of the men wore white suits.
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