The Winter's Tale

by William 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.28

  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.29

  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."30 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."31

  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 1997-98 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).32

  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.

  AT THE RSC

  The Winter's Tale--a "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.33 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.

  Venues

  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 we
nt 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.

  Period and Place

  Although the appeal to the oracle at Delphos suggests the classical world, no RSC director has opted for this setting, standard throughout the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, perhaps because the era contains less resonance for our generation and the costumes can be alienating.

  More surprisingly, the possible Renaissance setting has not proved popular either. Peter Wood's predominantly medieval 1960 production came closest: "both costumes and dcor evoked a mythical Renaissance, a world in which anything could happen and anything did."34 In 1976, the RST was converted into a hexagonal, galleried "Elizabethan-style" thrust stage for the season; even so, John Barton ignored this context, choosing to set his Winter's Tale in Lapland, establishing a primitive, ritualistic setting.

  Both the 1980s mainhouse productions (Ronald Eyre, 1981; Terry Hands, 1986) were described as Regency. Those in the 1990s were both early twentieth century: Gregory Doran (1999) opted for a "Ruritanian" setting, allowing echoes of tsarist autocracy within a recognizably modern world; Adrian Noble (1992) chose an English equivalent, with his 1930s Bohemia repeatedly compared to the painter Stanley Spencer's Cookham, a kind of idealized English village.

  Trevor Nunn (1969), Noble (1984), Warchus (2002), and Cooke (2006) all opted for the mid-twentieth century. In Nunn's case, he was choosing a totally contemporary setting, the only director to do so. Noble's setting was postwar Sicily, combining the tiaras, medals, and ball gowns of an "ambassadorial reception"35 with Mafia connotations. Warchus, too, drew out Mafia implications, but set his production in America, combining Hollywood film noir effects in Sicilia with an Appalachian setting for Bohemia.

  Visual Setting and Emotional Color

  Within these periods, overall visual choices for these productions were remarkably similar, dictated by the cyclical and seasonal nature of the play and the theme of death and rebirth. Design choices thus almost inevitably start the play in a wintry world, with white or monochrome dominating both costumes and set (1969, 1981, 1986, 2002, 2006); others have opted instead for deep autumnal colors or the regal spectrum of purples and cold lilacs. The set here is usually minimalist and symbolic, while costume choices are stylish and sophisticated.

  In strong contrast, Bohemia moves us through spring to the high summer of the sheep-shearing. Here designers always provide an explosion of color, a high level of rustic naturalism, and a stage crowded with scenery, colorful costumes, and visual detail. Warm colors and bright lights predominate.

  The final movement returns us to the petrified winter of Sicilia; these scenes, by reverting to the previous sparse setting and cold and limited color spectrum, and by using lighting that frequently constricts the playing area, show us a world frozen and often dark, until the advent of Perdita and Florizel brings with it light and indications of return to life.

  Music

  The musical underscoring of the action follows a similar trajectory. Minimalist solo instruments (e.g. sitar in 1976, piano in 1986) and sounds of "haunting ... remote melancholy"36 are typical in Sicilia, while in Bohemia a live band not only appears regularly onstage as part of the sheep-shearing festivities, but also often provides full-blooded offstage accompaniment to scene changes and even Autolycus' solo songs: these often have a music hall or vaudeville tone regardless of the period setting. The Appalachian bluegrass band of Warchus' Bohemia also played throughout the interval, getting the audience into the mood for the second half.

  1960: On the Brink of a New Era

  Peter Wood's production in the first year of the RSC faced both forward and backward, showing us The Winter's Tale at a clear turning point. Reviewers were still hampered by their negative preconceptions of the play, but were willing to have these overturned, as the Financial Times reviewer indicated: "triumphing over the bristling incredibilities and complex snags of this melodramatic fairytale ... [the] company have achieved a small theatrical near-miracle."37 The production was generally highly regarded. The Daily Telegraph reviewer noted how

  Mr Wood gave it a sombre setting of rusts and dark blues and employed some sheer magic with his lighting so that as Leontes soliloquises in corrosive error, his words wing out from the darkening stage as from his soul straight into our hearts. Under this treatment the bear that makes his dinner of Antigonus and the imagined sea coast of Bohemia fall into place as part of Shakespeare's bodying force [sic] of the strangest imaginings.38

  Jacques Noel's set design was economical and flexible, using "the vast empty spaces of the Stratford stage to conjure up medieval palaces, great plains and mighty seas."39 Yet its "modernism" clearly looked back fifty years to Granville-Barker and Gordon Craig, and elements of the resplendent barbarism that characterized the previous Stratford production in 1948 still lingered on. The New Statesman critic described the trial scene as displaying "barbaric magnificence ... swirling cloaks of crimson velvet, grotesquely armed soldiery, savagely grinning masks, all the grim pomp and tawdry splendour of Medievalism gone mad."40 The costumes throughout were regal and imposing, in rich colors, with deep ruffs, cloaks, and flowing sleeves, while Mamillius was dressed as "a miniature copy of his father."41 The production focused as much on the public roles as the private experience--imposing crowns were worn throughout, though Wood broke with tradition in excluding the court from the final scene. A further controversial innovation was to transform the usual "genteel trippings" of the sheep-shearing into "a full-bodied fertility rite."42

  Eric Porter's Leontes was universally lauded, "meet[ing] the play's initial difficulty by 'striking twelve' at once, thrusting the action forward with burning force and ferocity ... [yet] still a man and not a monster ... The hysterical tyrant of the play's opening and the benign penitent of its close are credibly one and the same."43 Elizabeth Sellers' "serene ... long-suffering" Hermione was virtually ignored by the critics, but Peggy Ashcroft revolutionized perceptions of Paulina, repositioning her from the expected "querulous character part"44 as a "female Polonius"45 or a "terrible scold and barking harridan"46 to establish her as a leading role, a woman "endowed ... with profound common sense and practical humanity ... epitomis[ing] the generosity and sadness of age."47

  3. Paulina, a force for good: Peggy Ashcroft presenting the baby to Leontes (Eric Porter) in Peter Wood's 1960 production.

  Thus, while in many ways Wood's production belonged to the pre-RSC tradition, it clearly also provided a transition that allowed a serious reevaluation of the play and its potential, enabling the interpretations to come.

  1969: Cubism and Carnaby Street

  By contrast, Trevor Nunn's innovative and highly controversial production brought The Winter's Tale sharply up to date, both in setting and approach. Dressed all in white on a bare white set, the Sicilian characters wore "contemporary neck-buttoned jackets and bell-bottomed trousers"48 with Polixenes "a splash of scarlet,"49 while the Bohemian sheep-shearing festival featured "a bunch of hippies on a musical picnic."50 References to Carnaby Street and the scandalous nude musical Hair abounded. In keeping with the mood of the 1960s, Nunn was interested in "a representative individual ... [not] a crowned king."51 The crowns were accordingly absent, and the play opened in Mamillius' nursery, rather than in the context of a royal banquet.

  4. "Hippies on a musical picnic": Judi Dench as Perdita takes a tumble with her Florizel (David Bailie) in Trevor Nunn's 1969 production.

  Despite this human emphasis, the production was heavily stylized. As the lights went down, the audience heard "a deep voice speak[ing] out of the air, hushing the theatre in mystery."52 Meanwhile, strobe lighting illuminated a rotating glass cube in which an agonized Leontes was imprisoned, his arms and legs outstretched like Leonardo's Renaissance Man. A spotlight then picked out "another glass box, a tiny one
this time, with a tiny mannikin revolving in it."53 The lights finally came up on a nursery filled with further symbolic toys, including a giant rocking horse on which Leontes and Mamillius rode together and a "school-boy's top" (2.1.123) which "fill[ed] the theatre with a gently evocative humming which recur[red] at the end of the play."54 The cube, too, recurred at the end, providing the setting in which Hermione's statue was displayed.

  The problem of Leontes' jealousy was also given a stylized solution. "Mr. Nunn simply makes it a condition of the story and establishes it by a stunning change of lighting in which we see Hermione and Polixenes as they appear in his fevered dream."55 Thus the audience was able both to believe in Hermione's purity and to experience Leontes' imaginings themselves, seeing them through his eyes, as Barber's startled reaction indicates: "[Hermione] actually appeared to fawn upon Polixenes."56 Similar stylization was used in the trial scene, in which Hermione fainted in slow motion. Finally, a single actress, Judi Dench, was cast in the roles of both Perdita and Hermione, in order to underline "the allegorical meaning of the end of the play ... [in which Leontes] finds his daughter returned to him in the form of his wife."57