Cymbeline (31 page)

Some have argued that the Wales scenes are chiefly of the domain of the “wild man” rather than the shepherd, and therefore they are not of the pastoral mode in the same way as
As You Like It
or
A Midsummer Night’s Dream
.
How did you envisage and stage them?

Cooke:
The world of Wales in the play has an innocence and connects with a sense of escape from the falseness and sophistication of city life. In this way it reflects plays like
As You Like It
, although Shakespeare’s treatment of the pastoral is never sentimental. He frequently presents nature as cruel. The Forest of Arden in
As You Like It
, for example, is partly a place of recuperation and escape, but Orlando escapes being bitten by a snake there only to be attacked by a lion. The Wales of
Cymbeline
is equally a dangerous place, hostile to outsiders—Guiderius kills Cloten virtually on sight. In our design we created a contrast between the three worlds of the play through costume and props—the set stayed the same throughout. It was a spare, stripped-back stage with the usual floor of the Swan Theatre stacked up against the back wall. There was a trapdoor in the stage that Guiderius and Arviragus crawled out of. But within that theatrical setting there was also a sense of realism in the way that the characters lived in the wild—realistic hunting knives and bows and arrows were used.

Rice:
These scenes were the hardest in the whole show. The reason for this was not necessarily Shakespeare. I think, in the UK, that theater tends to be a very middle-class pursuit, and middle-class people trying to look rough and wild can just look ridiculous. We laughed more than is possible trying to make these scenes real. In spite of
this, I think the concept for them was very strong. I wanted the two lost children to live on the streets and to be the human fallout of conflict. I didn’t want these scenes to be in a cave, I didn’t feel that had any resonance for us. I wanted to create a world that was challenging and recognizable. We got there in the end, but it was hard to marry the epic language with such a social realism. We wrestled with these ideas and managed to create an edgy environment, with old mattresses and spray cans. We struggled to make it believable and often lost confidence, but then a really magic thing happened. When we took the show to Colombia, the audience had an amazing reaction. They completely understood the story we were trying to tell and had a genuine reference to it. That really inspired us to believe in that choice. It was going to Colombia that made us believe that this was not only strong, but very important.

How did you represent Rome and the Roman gods in your productions?

Cooke:
We went with the idea that the gods were real to the characters in the play. So we created a shrine to Jupiter, with an eagle’s head, above the audience. Whenever someone spoke to the gods, which they did frequently, they addressed the shrine. This made the characters’ relationship to the gods a concrete one. In the play, Rome is characterized as a hybrid of the machiavellian intrigue of the Italian Renaissance and the efficiency of the Roman army. So we created a world which was part Ancient Rome—Roman armor and sandals in the military sections—with contemporary Rome, very fashion conscious and with a strong sense of display. Iachimo and most of the men wore white suits.

Rice:
I had Jupiter as a god of war, which of course he is. We had him in an army uniform. I don’t think we have any connection to the Roman gods anymore, and only very faint ones to Greek gods. However, I love the notion of gods with a small “g.” In many ways theater is all about three levels of communication. There’s one’s relationship with oneself, one’s relationship to the people onstage with you and the audience, and the relationship to the “superstructure” of life. That’s where the gods come in. You have those times in life where you just wish somebody would come and help. It’s like looking for a fantasy dad. It’s not even your own dad you want, you need a Super-dad to come and tell you it’s all right and what to do. That’s how I wanted Jupiter to be, although he is a little harsh and judgmental! As I said earlier, in some ways war can be a positive force in fairy tales, in that it makes people grow up and see the world in a broader picture. What I wanted to do with the gods was to say, look, this destroys lives on every level. He looked magnificent, my god/dad, and I had him flying, so used quite old-fashioned godlike imagery.

10.
Emma Rice’s production, 2006. Image shows Hayley Carmichael, Carl Grose, and Craig Johnson. The Welsh scenes “were the hardest in the whole show … I didn’t want these scenes to be in a cave, I didn’t feel that had any resonance for us. I wanted to create a world that was challenging and recognizable … [We] managed to create an edgy environment, with old mattresses and spray cans.”

Many critics have remarked on the difficulty of Shakespeare’s late style in general, and on
Cymbeline
in particular. How did you and your actors find the language of the play? Is it more difficult than that of earlier Shakespeare plays, and could this be a reason for its relative unpopularity?

Cooke:
Much of the play’s language is convoluted and we did edit some of the subclauses from the lengthy sentences of the opening scene where the characters are speaking in a courtly code. It’s as if everyone is nervous about being overheard and potentially incriminated. The Queen is at the height of her corrupt power as the play opens, so there is a strong dramatic reason for the courtiers to be speaking in such an indirect way. However, given how much exposition there is as the play opens, the indirect language felt like a significant obstacle for the audience which we dealt with by making a few small cuts. With the rest of the play, we spent a lot of time making sure that all the actors knew exactly what every word meant. Then we worked on inhabiting each word and getting the flow and forward thinking of the very long sentences. The language in the play is self-feeding and hyperbolic. An idea can be set up at the start of the speech and can snowball through many lines and many, seemingly diversionary subclauses. However, by and large, when you commit to the subclauses, as with many of the idiosyncrasies of the play, it works.

Rice:
I’ve said this before, and I’m not ashamed about it, but I find some Shakespeare almost impossible to understand. Obviously some plays are easier than others, but they’re all really difficult.
Cymbeline
is almost impenetrable at times. When we first tried to read it at Kneehigh, we felt the terrible weight of the text and it almost destroyed our process. So I did what I always do, which is to push through until I can tell the story. Then I leave the text behind for as long as possible. By really understanding what the story is and what it means to me, and then making that structure work, then, and only then, do I feed the text back in. At that point I use only what we need to make the story work. I was fairly irreverent with the text, because I didn’t think it stood up in the modern world. I don’t mean as a play, because I’m not an expert, I mean as a story. I’m a storyteller and the story structure of
Cymbeline
is very complicated. I always try and retain a childlike state when making work. That doesn’t mean that the work becomes simplified—it absolutely shouldn’t—but it should be simple. I think Einstein said “work should be as simple as possible and no simpler,” and that’s a really good mantra for Shakespeare.
People should be able to understand it, otherwise what are we saying?

Famously people say that the first scene in
Cymbeline
is one of the worst scenes in Shakespeare, and yet I bloody love it! It’s a fairly ropey piece of work: he doesn’t even give them names, it’s just Gentleman 1 and Gentleman 2 and then we never see them again. They come on and one says “You’ll never guess what” and the other says “What?” and then they basically give us the plot up to that point. It’s really crude, but it is such a relief! In this production I wanted to give that person a name and a character, so I created a woman called Joan who was returning home (another homecoming!) after being in the Costa del Sol for thirty years. We did this because we had to work out why this character didn’t have a clue what was going on! I had the idea of somebody returning, full of life, and realizing what an awful state the nation was in. The critics found that very challenging, but I know that any young people who came to see that show were relieved that they were helped to know what was going on.

Critics have been divided over the last act; some have been troubled by the way it re-narrates plot at great length, and at times evinces—horror of horrors—laughter from its audience, while others have conversely described the virtuosity of Shakespeare’s dramatic management in
Cymbeline
,
and the skill with which the plot threads reconvene at the end. Do you see Shakespearean senility or Shakespearean magic at work in this play?

Cooke:
I think it’s magic. All of the late plays, and
Cymbeline
is the most extreme example, have moments of self-conscious theatricality. If you think of the bear in
The Winter’s Tale
, or Thaisa coming back to life in
Pericles
, it’s as if Shakespeare is daring the audience not to accept what’s being presented. That playful quality of testing theatricality is a feature of the final scene of
Cymbeline
and, by contrast, it deepens the authentic emotion of the discoveries and reunions. The contradiction in the play between truth and artificiality is part of its pleasure and it’s why the play frequently works very well in performance, even if it seems improbable on the page. The golden rule of performing this play is to commit one hundred percent to the reality
of the situation, to perform it without comment. The slightest wink at the audience would be fatal. We were playful with aspects of our production, the costume especially, but we believed in and honored the scenes themselves at all times.

Rice:
I just cut all of the recapping! I think that you have to make theater for the audience that is going to see it. We’re now so used to films and television, to very fast-paced and visual storytelling, we don’t want or need unnecessary reinforcement. We’re a modern audience and we want to get to the next feeling, the next idea.

As for senility or magic, I think he was just a little lazy. It’s a messy piece of work. That doesn’t mean there isn’t magic there, and there may be a little senility also, but it is certainly lazy. Whoever Shakespeare was, he could write great structure and great plays, and this isn’t one. Now, don’t get me wrong—I love that! There’s no beauty in perfection! It’s lovely to think, “I’m going to pick up the baton.” That’s how I see it. I see it as a relay race for storytellers: I’m going to take the baton and see what I can do with it.

The final reconciliations were one of the things that I was most proud of in this production, and in terms of the fairy-tale structure, I didn’t find it awkward at all. The metaphor was beautiful. I put everybody to bed at the end of the show and dropped a patchwork banner saying “good night.” What I was really saying was that no matter what troubles you go through and what dark places you go to, you can find a home. It doesn’t mean it’s all going to be okay, it just means there is a home, even if it’s not the home you thought it was going to be. I loved the end. It was very beautiful that all of those disconnected stories came together. That certainly liberated some of the magic that I think Shakespeare created for
Cymbeline
, we just gave it a little help!

William Shakespeare was an extraordinarily intelligent man who was born and died in an ordinary market town in the English Midlands. He lived an uneventful life in an eventful age. Born in April 1564, he was the eldest son of John Shakespeare, a glove maker who was prominent on the town council until he fell into financial difficulties. Young William was educated at the local grammar in Stratford-upon-Avon, Warwickshire, where he gained a thorough grounding in the Latin language, the art of rhetoric, and classical poetry. He married Ann Hathaway and had three children (Susanna, then the twins Hamnet and Judith) before his twenty-first birthday: an exceptionally young age for the period. We do not know how he supported his family in the mid-1580s.

Like many clever country boys, he moved to the city in order to make his way in the world. Like many creative people, he found a career in the entertainment business. Public playhouses and professional full-time acting companies reliant on the market for their income were born in Shakespeare’s childhood. When he arrived in London as a man, sometime in the late 1580s, a new phenomenon was in the making: the actor who is so successful that he becomes a “star.” The word did not exist in its modern sense, but the pattern is recognizable: audiences went to the theater not so much to see a particular show as to witness the comedian Richard Tarlton or the dramatic actor Edward Alleyn.