The Winter's Tale (review)

This latest production from the all-male Shakespeare troupe Propeller, based at the Watermill Theatre in Britain, illuminates the interpretive range of single-gender casting. Propeller, whose previous stagings include A Midsummer Night's Dream, Twelfth Night, Othello, and Rose Rage (this last a condensed version of the three Henry VI plays), has chosen one of Shakespeare's most tonally complex works, emphasizing its perplexing and tragicomical extremes. While the troupe takes few liberties with the text, the aesthetic is more experimental. The male actors make a minimal attempt to appear feminine (dresses and scarves are offset by rather hairy chests and muscled arms). One can draw a contrast here to other recent all-male productions, such as Mark Rylance's Measure for Measure at the Globe, in which Edward Hogg's Isabella conveys about as good an approximation of Shakespeare's boy actors as is possible for a grown man.

The plot is simple: a king turns on his own wife with a baseless accusation of infidelity with his best friend, apparently destroying both family and friendship. After the catastrophic first three acts, we fast-forward sixteen years and attempt to undo the damage. The Winter's Tale places a notable emphasis on its women: the unjust imprisonment of the pregnant Queen Hermione, the rebellious, nearly seditious stance of the courtier Paulina, and the disastrous rejection and casting out of the infant Perdita signal a work in which women are initially utterly powerless but ultimately all-controlling. The barely veiled masculinity of Simon Scardifield's Hermione might seem likely to work against the pathos of the Queen's suffering, but that is not in fact the case. In the trial scene of act 3, in which Hermione asserts her innocence while acknowledging the hopelessness of her situation, Scardifield's face shows stubble even while the Queen's garb is stained from childbirth. The constant, low-level dissonance in the representation always reminds us of the theatrical effect, of the storytelling to which we are witness. Director Edward Hall has not forgotten the title of the play, and keeps reminding us, through various metatheatrical devices, that we are being told a tale.

Key to Hall's interpretation of this tale are the royal children, Mamillius and Perdita—both played by Tam Williams. The apparent destruction of the royal family is conveyed through the loss of these children, and here again the production thwarts any attempt at realism: Williams plays both a young boy whose death marks the end of the first part of the work, and a young woman who becomes the means of redemption in the second. One actor is used to provide a bridge between the most harrowing scene (the trial scene that ends in death) and the most ludicrous (the rowdy and silly shepherds' festival with which the action commences after a sixteen-year gap). Williams's Mamillius even remains onstage in the crucial intervening scenes in which the infant Perdita is abandoned in the wild and the representation of Time steps forward to explain the play's great chronological leap. The destruction of the ship that carried Perdita away and the death of Antigonus, the courtier charged with leaving her in the wild, are enacted upstage by the young Mamillius: he plays roughly with a toy ship, then stages a violent encounter between a doll and a teddy bear (neatly solving the vexing problem presented by the stage direction for Antigonus: "Exit, pursued by a bear"). Two effects are noteworthy here: crucial dramatic action is presented as play, and the presence of Mamillius is extended beyond his death. He immediately after adopts the role of Time, leading us into...