Cymbeline (29 page)

5.
William Gaskill’s production, 1962. Vanessa Redgrave as Innogen gave the character “such a heartfelt honesty and beauty that I swear that every man in the audience must have felt the urge to jump onto the stage to her rescue.”

1974—bold adventurer

Susan Fleetwood was an Amazonian Innogen, less obviously vulnerable than some others, but more convincing than most in boy’s clothes. B. A. Young found her “a rather unromantic Imogen, square and undemonstrative,”
¹¹³
but Irving Wardle wrote that she was “not obvious casting physically but utterly consistent to the limpid openness of the role, and superbly in control of its broken elegiac verse.”
¹¹⁴
She also managed the difficult blend of pathos and comedy in Innogen’s role: “Her height and her bold, incisive style, ensure that the girl’s innocence is not maudlin … She is, at once, a creature lit from within by the lamp of her own integrity and, in her naivety, rather funny.”
¹¹⁵

1979—“mercurial humour”

Judi Dench won critics’ and audiences’ hearts: “Judi Dench’s beautiful performance as the adorable Imogen, pure but passionate, sensitive but spirited, is reason enough for this year’s RSC production”;
¹¹⁶
“Blonde, impassioned and comely, Miss Dench is a divine Imogen.”
¹¹⁷
She dealt with the difficulty of the play’s potential for unintended comedy by investing her role with “a constant mercurial humour,”
¹¹⁸
as though Imogen herself was aware of the absurdities in her situation. Billington commented, too, on a quality which has become a quintessential part of the Dench armory—the sudden switch to cutting coolness, “particularly fine is her treatment of Iachimo’s attempted seduction, regarding his recantation with the studied coolness of a hostess who has found a house guest walking off with the cutlery.”
¹¹⁹

1987—“fanatical ardour”

Irving Wardle described Harriet Walter as “the RSC’s reigning specialist in fanatical ardour,”
¹²⁰
while Andrew Rissik encapsulated the general critical acclaim for her performance when he wrote, “Harriet Walter’s grave, passionate wide-eyed Imogen is an auburn-haired pre-Raphaelite princess, setting out with unswerving, headstrong ardour on the troublous adventure of love.”
¹²¹
She herself says that she wanted to challenge the idealization of Imogen, describing her thus: “My image of Imogen was something of Boudicca and something of Fuchsia in Mervyn Peake’s
Gormenghast
—the smutty rebel child grown to wilful adult with Amazon potential.”
¹²²
She was defiantly independent and rebellious and her explosive relationship with her father was emphasized by the (genuine) slap on the jaw that David Bradley, as Cymbeline, gave her every night.

6.
Bill Alexander’s production, 1987. Harriet Walter describes her characterization of Innogen as “the smutty rebel child grown to wilful adult with Amazon potential.” She was also “defiantly independent and rebellious” and had an “explosive relationship with her father.” David Bradley as Cymbeline.

1997—verbal musicality

In the Japanese-inspired setting of Adrian Noble’s 1997 production, Joanne Pearce played a softer Innogen, a woman of deep sweetness with a seemingly limitless capacity for suffering. Using her considerable vocal range, she explored and exploited the possibilities offered by the language of the play. Charles Spencer commented, “Joanne Pearce plays her with a mixture of sense and sensuality that left the viewer besotted.”
¹²³

2003—rebel princess

Emma Fielding’s performance was universally praised. She played a strong, tough young woman: “Her Imogen may lack vulnerability but she radiantly personifies virtue without being merely ladylike.”
¹²⁴
She had “emotional candour, charm and courage.”
¹²⁵
Physically slight and fragile, she was all determination and will, and whether in her self-chosen costume of golden gown and boots or dressed as a boy, she had “a look of accidental glamour—an intense waif.”
¹²⁶

2006—rejected child

In Kneehigh’s updated production, Hayley Carmichael, in sandals and plaits, played Innogen, in Susanna Clapp’s words, “like a radiant seven-year-old.”
¹²⁷
Tiny and bewildered, “[her] beautifully impulsive Imogen feels the pain of rejection like a child does, without limit.”
¹²⁸

Pure Malice: Iachimo

Iachimo and the Queen are the drivers of the plot through their self-centered malice, but the most successful Iachimos have been those
who suffered from the consciousness of their guilt. In 1962, Eric Porter’s Iachimo “insisted on being a richly rounded, living character”
¹²⁹
and “his treachery was undertaken with such grace that we almost forgave him”;
¹³⁰
in 1974, Ian Richardson, often the epitome of cold detachment, played Iachimo as a “bored Italian aristocrat who has no sooner slandered Imogen but he is stricken by grave remorse.”
¹³¹
In 2003, Anton Lesser, in white designer suit, played “chilly arrogance” and “vicious lasciviousness”: his emergence from the trunk in Innogen’s bedroom—first a hand and then the rest of him—was performed with agonizing slowness in a scarcely breathing theater. However, his repentance was moving—in his appearance in the final scene he appeared to have shrunk physically with his loss of brio. Ben Kingsley, in 1979, was “gleefully villainous,”
¹³²
a suave Renaissance villain who committed to memory the details of Innogen’s bedroom “with the manic zeal of a private eye cracking a particularly difficult case,”
¹³³
while Donald Sumpter, in 1987, in the close intimacy of The Other Place, scrutinized the sleeping Innogen “with the cool fascination of a surgeon.”
¹³⁴
In 1997, Paul Freeman was a wolfishly grinning Iago-like villain, who invested the bedroom scene with “an amazing erotic charge.”
¹³⁵

The Queen

The Queen is given no name—like a fairy-tale wicked queen. She is pure malice. Patience Collier, in 1962, though “as tart as a basket of sloes,” was felt to be a little underpowered vocally but, in 1974, Sheila Allen was “like a psychedelic superstar who shops at Biba,”
¹³⁶
“a queen of night, whirling in multi-coloured plumage, reserving her most honeyed manner for those she plans to destroy”;
¹³⁷
in the 1997 kabuki-style production, Joanna McCallum, in ferocious conical hair, reminded Charles Spencer of Disney’s wicked queen in
Snow White
, and in Dominic Cooke’s 2003 production Ishia Bennison stalked the stage on stiletto heels, trailing her cloak of peacock feathers with its hundred spying eyes like a great, predatory bird. Heather Canning, in 1979, offered “only the fair face of this dissembling schemer”
¹³⁸
and, in keeping with the production’s willingness to embrace the play’s humorous elements, her evil was “cunningly transmuted into mischief,” so that, B. A. Young wrote, “I almost expected her to wink at
me as she handed over the poison to Pisanio.”
¹³⁹
In 2006, Emma Rice, also adapter and director of Kneehigh’s production, played her as a fantasy nurse, raunchy and lethal, in black stockings and latex gloves. The Queen’s deadly potions became prescription drugs, administered with a syringe big enough to treat a horse, by means of which she kept Cymbeline in a zombielike state of dependence.

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.