The Winter’s Tale
A Review of the RSC Production at the Swan Theatre, Stratford-upon-Avon, Saturday 25th November 2006
When the RSC do something well they do it very well. When they do something badly they do it very badly, as was the case with the excruciating Hecuba a couple of years ago. But when they do something exceptional it remains in the memory for all time, as Greg Doran’s hilarious A Midsummer Night’s Dream has done, and most of the plays in the hard-hitting Gunpowder Series at the Swan last year. Dominic Cooke’s new production of The Winter’s Tale is exceptional.
And it’s exceptional at many levels, not least the acting, which is flawless, especially the interpretation of Shakespeare’s language, which must seem increasingly foreign to both speaker and listener alike in these text-sending abbreviated times, but can, when spoken well, be enlightening, mystical, humorous, and dark, very dark; and all of those elements apply to The Winter’s Tale. Try getting your chops around the following short speech by Leontes, and making sense of it, and giving the audience a chance - in the time it takes to count ten - to make sense of it…
No, in good earnest.
How sometimes nature will betray its folly,
Its tenderness, and make itself a pastime
To harder bosoms! Looking on the lines
Of my boy’s face, methoughts I did recoil
Twenty-three years, and saw myself un-
breech’d,
In my green velvet, my dagger muzzled,
Lest it should bite its master, and so prove,
As ornaments oft do, too dangerous:
How like, methought, I then was to this
kernel,
This squash, this gentleman. Mine honest
friend,
Will you take eggs for money?
Obviously, by reading and re-reading the above you are able, eventually, to get a sense of Shakespeare’s meaning, but it’s not easy. Put those lines in the mouth of a bad actor and they are gone forever, put them in the mouth of an actor with heart and intellect, or better still in the mouth of Anton Lesser (Leontes in this sparking production), an actor of huge heart and intellect, and you understand immediately how those words are the code to the inner paranoia that drives this King of Sicilia.
The man becomes the words, the words the man.
The Winter’s Tale was most likely written in 1610, with the London Globe performance of May 15th 1611, witnessed by a Dr Forman, who briefly describes the event in his unpublished manuscript, Booke of Plaies and Notes thereof - which is now locked away in some Oxford College gathering dust - where he criticises the fact that there are no five-measure lines of rhyme, but many double endings. And he’s right. The whole play is written in hard blank verse, or plain, steel-chiselled prose that pre-echoes Samuel Beckett in the way it can drive straight to the heart. It’s writing that takes no prisoners.
And like most of Shakespeare’s late plays The Winter’s Tale is too little performed these days because it’s often thought to be too difficult for modern players and audiences, which is double speak for saying it won’t attract good houses, as would, say, Romeo & Juliet at the one extreme, or Measure for Measure at the other. This RSC show puts the lie to that.
