The Winter's Tale (review)

The Winter's Tale. By William Shakespeare. Royal National Theatre, Olivier Theatre, London. 22 May 2001.

This production opened amid vigorous speculation about Trevor Nunn's successor as Director of the National Theatre, and its director, Nicholas Hytner, was a natural for the short list. He took the unusual step of publicly bolstering his case, arguing for more productions of great plays in large theatre spaces like the Olivier at a time when artists and audiences seem to be gravitating toward intimate venues like the Cottesloe, Donmar Warehouse, and Almeida. Thus, he raised the stakes on the critical verdict of his own production. Actors' vocal effectiveness in large spaces entered into the public debate, and, unfortunately, lapses in diction and projection in this production illustrate why it has become a subject of discussion. I attended the press opening and as reviews appeared over the next several days, critics were sharply divided in their reactions to the production.

Hytner took a modern dress approach, allowing the early tragic action to unfold in a posh series of penthouse rooms with urban vistas suggesting a Chelsea or South Kensington interior overlooking commercial London. He exploited contemporary interest in peeking through royal keyholes, showing royals at leisure in the game room, at rest over cocktails, showing off their children and fondly remembering old times (aptly represented by a large photo of Leontes and Polixenes as youths at play). The setting facilitated this approach, using two large moving scrim panels tracked to meet at a ninety-degree angle down center to mask changes, allowing a dreamlike glimpse of interior action and generally providing swiftly appearing contemporary accoutrements to the action. All this was fringed downstage with a low border of stacked pieces of black slate, awaiting the move to Bohemia. As the play opened, the elegantly attired characters listened to Mamillius recite Shakespeare's sonnet "When I do count the clock," a device echoed later in the play when Mamillius delivered Time's speech as the play made its transition into the pastoral.

The modern dress concept defined the production and took it to its highest and lowest points. It provided accessibility to the early acts and emphasized a naturalistic emotional interaction that illuminated Leontes' slide into jealousy. The opportunity was fully grasped by the admirable Alex Jennings, who vividly depicted Leontes' nostalgia for childhood and his friendship with Polixenes, his love for his very pregnant Hermione, and a carefully modulated and fully believable descent from a prosperity he could not handle into pathological jealousy. But on the other side of the ledger it subtracted from our understanding of the larger significance of Leontes' mental slide--that a state and its people depend on him. Although the court retainers were cleverly translated into a kind of West Wing group that gave a sense of the civic thread in the piece, it took us out of the world of absolute rule into a more casual era, where royal foibles and sexual obsessions became tabloid stories evoking amusement in contrast to the anxiety of a citizenry whose economic and even spiritual well-being depends on the competence and attention span of its leader. That being said, the dimension and range of Jennings' performance was so emotionally powerful that he fully succeeded in engaging the audience in a personal and emotional tragedy of major proportions. He painted a portrait of a human unnaturally isolated from his fellows, uneasy with his good fortune, tracing an arc from modest self absorption to a destructive whirlpool of megalomania that dragged all around him into its vortex.

The moving portrayal of Leontes' psychology was complemented by the effective presentation of other major emotional transitions. The abandonment of Perdita was heart rending as Antigonus (Geoffrey Beevers) tested the temperature of her bottle. Paulina (Deborah Findlay), in a first rate performance, used all the moxie of a power-lunching woman who had broken the glass ceiling in hectoring Leontes for his foolishness, providing a contrast in emotional competence to his tortured confusion. The trial evoked the...