The Winter's Tale (24 page)
Authors: William Shakespeare
Although the appeal to the oracle at Delphos suggests the classical world, no RSC director has opted for this setting, standard throughout
the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, perhaps because the era contains less resonance for our generation and the costumes can be alienating.
More surprisingly, the possible Renaissance setting has not proved popular either. Peter Wood's predominantly medieval 1960 production came closest: “both costumes and dcor evoked a mythical Renaissance, a world in which anything could happen and anything did.”
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In 1976, the RST was converted into a hexagonal, galleried “Elizabethan-style” thrust stage for the season; even so, John Barton ignored this context, choosing to set his
Winter's Tale
in Lapland, establishing a primitive, ritualistic setting.
Both the 1980s mainhouse productions (Ronald Eyre, 1981; Terry Hands, 1986) were described as Regency. Those in the 1990s were both early twentieth century: Gregory Doran (1999) opted for a “Ruritanian” setting, allowing echoes of tsarist autocracy within a recognizably modern world; Adrian Noble (1992) chose an English equivalent, with his 1930s Bohemia repeatedly compared to the painter Stanley Spencer's Cookham, a kind of idealized English village.
Trevor Nunn (1969), Noble (1984), Warchus (2002), and Cooke (2006) all opted for the mid-twentieth century. In Nunn's case, he was choosing a totally contemporary setting, the only director to do so. Noble's setting was postwar Sicily, combining the tiaras, medals, and ball gowns of an “ambassadorial reception”
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with Mafia connotations. Warchus, too, drew out Mafia implications, but set his production in America, combining Hollywood film noir effects in Sicilia with an Appalachian setting for Bohemia.
Within these periods, overall visual choices for these productions were remarkably similar, dictated by the cyclical and seasonal nature of the play and the theme of death and rebirth. Design choices thus almost inevitably start the play in a wintry world, with white or monochrome dominating both costumes and set (1969, 1981, 1986, 2002, 2006); others have opted instead for deep autumnal colors or the regal spectrum of purples and cold lilacs. The set here is usually minimalist and symbolic, while costume choices are stylish and sophisticated.
In strong contrast, Bohemia moves us through spring to the high summer of the sheep-shearing. Here designers always provide an explosion of color, a high level of rustic naturalism, and a stage crowded with scenery, colorful costumes, and visual detail. Warm colors and bright lights predominate.
The final movement returns us to the petrified winter of Sicilia; these scenes, by reverting to the previous sparse setting and cold and limited color spectrum, and by using lighting that frequently constricts the playing area, show us a world frozen and often dark, until the advent of Perdita and Florizel brings with it light and indications of return to life.
The musical underscoring of the action follows a similar trajectory. Minimalist solo instruments (e.g. sitar in 1976, piano in 1986) and sounds of “haunting ⦠remote melancholy”
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are typical in Sicilia, while in Bohemia a live band not only appears regularly onstage as part of the sheep-shearing festivities, but also often provides full-blooded offstage accompaniment to scene changes and even Autolycus' solo songs: these often have a music hall or vaudeville tone regardless of the period setting. The Appalachian bluegrass band of Warchus' Bohemia also played throughout the interval, getting the audience into the mood for the second half.
Peter Wood's production in the first year of the RSC faced both forward and backward, showing us
The Winter's Tale
at a clear turning point. Reviewers were still hampered by their negative preconceptions of the play, but were willing to have these overturned, as the
Financial Times
reviewer indicated: “triumphing over the bristling incredibilities and complex snags of this melodramatic fairytale ⦠[the] company have achieved a small theatrical near-miracle.”
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The production was generally highly regarded. The
Daily Telegraph
reviewer noted how
Mr Wood gave it a sombre setting of rusts and dark blues and employed some sheer magic with his lighting so that as
Leontes soliloquises in corrosive error, his words wing out from the darkening stage as from his soul straight into our hearts. Under this treatment the bear that makes his dinner of Antigonus and the imagined sea coast of Bohemia fall into place as part of Shakespeare's bodying force [
sic
] of the strangest imaginings.
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Jacques Noel's set design was economical and flexible, using “the vast empty spaces of the Stratford stage to conjure up medieval palaces, great plains and mighty seas.”
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Yet its “modernism” clearly looked back fifty years to Granville-Barker and Gordon Craig, and elements of the resplendent barbarism that characterized the previous Stratford production in 1948 still lingered on. The
New Statesman
critic described the trial scene as displaying “barbaric magnificence ⦠swirling cloaks of crimson velvet, grotesquely armed soldiery, savagely grinning masks, all the grim pomp and tawdry splendour of Medievalism gone mad.”
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The costumes throughout were regal and imposing, in rich colors, with deep ruffs, cloaks, and flowing sleeves, while Mamillius was dressed as “a miniature copy of his father.”
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The production focused as much on the public roles as the private experienceâimposing crowns were worn throughout, though Wood broke with tradition in excluding the court from the final scene. A further controversial innovation was to transform the usual “genteel trippings” of the sheep-shearing into “a full-bodied fertility rite.”
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Eric Porter's Leontes was universally lauded, “meet[ing] the play's initial difficulty by âstriking twelve' at once, thrusting the action forward with burning force and ferocity ⦠[yet] still a man and not a monster ⦠The hysterical tyrant of the play's opening and the benign penitent of its close are credibly one and the same.”
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Elizabeth Sellers' “serene ⦠long-suffering” Hermione was virtually ignored by the critics, but Peggy Ashcroft revolutionized perceptions of Paulina, repositioning her from the expected “querulous character part”
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as a “female Polonius”
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or a “terrible scold and barking harridan”
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to establish her as a leading role, a woman “endowed ⦠with profound common sense and practical humanity ⦠epitomis[ing] the generosity and sadness of age.”
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3. Paulina, a force for good: Peggy Ashcroft presenting the baby to Leontes (Eric Porter) in Peter Wood's 1960 production.
Thus, while in many ways Wood's production belonged to the pre-RSC tradition, it clearly also provided a transition that allowed a serious reevaluation of the play and its potential, enabling the interpretations to come.
By contrast, Trevor Nunn's innovative and highly controversial production brought
The
Winter's Tale
sharply up to date, both in setting and approach. Dressed all in white on a bare white set, the Sicilian characters wore “contemporary neck-buttoned jackets and bell-bottomed trousers”
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with Polixenes “a splash of scarlet,”
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while the Bohemian sheep-shearing festival featured “a bunch of hippies on a musical picnic.”
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References to Carnaby Street and the scandalous nude musical
Hair
abounded. In keeping with the mood of the 1960s, Nunn was interested in “a representative individual ⦠[not] a crowned king.”
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The crowns were accordingly absent, and the
play opened in Mamillius' nursery, rather than in the context of a royal banquet.
4. “Hippies on a musical picnic”: Judi Dench as Perdita takes a tumble with her Florizel (David Bailie) in Trevor Nunn's 1969 production.
Despite this human emphasis, the production was heavily stylized. As the lights went down, the audience heard “a deep voice speak[ing] out of the air, hushing the theatre in mystery.”
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Meanwhile, strobe lighting illuminated a rotating glass cube in which an agonized Leontes was imprisoned, his arms and legs outstretched like Leonardo's
Renaissance Man.
A spotlight then picked out “another glass box, a tiny one this time, with a tiny mannikin revolving in it.”
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The lights finally came up on a nursery filled with further symbolic toys, including a giant rocking horse on which Leontes and Mamillius rode together and a “school-boy's top” (2.1.123) which “fill[ed] the theatre with a gently evocative humming
which recur[red] at the end of the play.”
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The cube, too, recurred at the end, providing the setting in which Hermione's statue was displayed.
The problem of Leontes' jealousy was also given a stylized solution. “Mr. Nunn simply makes it a condition of the story and establishes it by a stunning change of lighting in which we see Hermione and Polixenes as they appear in his fevered dream.”
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Thus the audience was able both to believe in Hermione's purity and to experience Leontes' imaginings themselves, seeing them through his eyes, as Barber's startled reaction indicates: “[Hermione] actually appeared to fawn upon Polixenes.”
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Similar stylization was used in the trial scene, in which Hermione fainted in slow motion. Finally, a single actress, Judi Dench, was cast in the roles of both Perdita and Hermione, in order to underline “the allegorical meaning of the end of the play ⦠[in which Leontes] finds his daughter returned to him in the form of his wife.”
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Dench proved immensely successful in both parts. J. C. Trewin's comments in the
Birmingham Post
may seem hyperbolic, but are typical in both tone and content of the general critical response:
As Hermione the actress affected me like the pure clear beauty of a starlight night. We have not had in our time a performance of more simply expressed emotion ⦠As Perdita, she is enchantingly the queen of the sheep-shearing, dancing like a wave of the sea and speaking ⦠neither with a brittle gentility nor with a country accent too forced ⦠Miss Dench's response to the verse is unerringly exact.
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Despite this effusive praise for Dench herself, the concept of the doubling proved less successful. The roles had last been combined by Mary Anderson in 1887, when Perdita's lines in the final scene had been cut, and the character played there by a stand-in who kept her back to the audience. Nunn's solution was more tricksy than this: a stand-in for Hermione in the first half of the scene enabled Dench to deliver Perdita's lines; a rapid swap then introduced a stand-in Perdita, allowing Dench to take over as Hermione. Even though this sleight of hand worked effectively, the audience was inevitably distracted,
focusing on the theatrical tour de force rather than surrendering totally to the emotion of the final scene.
Nunn's production proved immensely influential. The stylized white decor, the focus on the personal rather than political, the youthful protagonists, the highlighting of Mamillius, his toys and nursery, the doubling of Hermione and Perdita, and the mid-twentieth-century setting have all been reused repeatedly since. Nunn was also responsible for introducing the business in which Paulina hands the baby to Leontes in Act 2 Scene 3, and also the first postwar director to use Hermione herself to speak the words of Antigonus' dream.
John Barton's 1976 production, co-directed with Trevor Nunn, was heavily cut throughout. It stands apart from the mainstream of RSC productions of
The Winter's Tale
, and has generated comparatively little attention since. The Arctic setting, chosen for the symbolism of Lapland's solstice festivals, failed to capture reviewers' imagination, and the lack of the usual contrast between Sicilia and Bohemia was heavily criticized. The interpretation focused strongly on storytelling and emphasized ritual throughout, notably in the trial scene and in its use of motifs such as the bear.