The Winter's Tale (25 page)

Hermione and Perdita were linked by exoticism. Critic Richard David stated: “This Hermione was not the simple symbol of nobility and sincerity that is sometimes seen, but a conspicuously foreign princess,”
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and Roger Warren compared Perdita to a “Byzantine icon.”
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Reviewer Harold Hobson praised Marilyn Taylerson's Hermione for her “unexpectedly sharp tongue … there is not a scrap of flirtatiousness in her”;
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Ian McKellen gave a “bristling performance” as Leontes “in a part ideally suited to his temperament and verse-speaking abilities.”
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The one influential innovation was the repositioning of Hermione's statue, traditionally placed upstage center with both court and audience looking up at her. Barton positioned her by the proscenium left, facing out, with the court looking diagonally down at her from upstage, thus enabling the audience to see everyone's reactions. This restaging won universal praise for enhancing the emotional power of the play's resolution.

Ronald Eyre's production was notable for the unusual and highly praised performance of Patrick Stewart as a Leontes who covered his jealousy with “gaiety” and “dangerous geniality,” although in retrospect clearly “jealous from the start.”
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In keeping with this, the opening exchanges between the central trio were informal, characterized by friendly, youthful horseplay and jokes. However, both Hermione and Leontes wore crowns for the final scene, emphasizing a public as well as a private dimension to their reconciliation.

Sheila Hancock's Paulina also won praise: “equally original … a compassionate friend rather than tart scold.”
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However, the overall Brechtian style of the production was less popular: “four coldly clinical lamps”
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shone down onto the acting area; the white costumes appeared sterile rather than stylish; the set was high and blank-walled.

As in 1976, the production's “dominant visual motif” was “that of the theatre, of performing a story.”
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Here a masque introduced the action, foreshadowing what was to come: as director, Leontes

In 1984 a small-scale tour visited “non-velvet” venues, from cathedrals and sports halls to an agricultural showground.
The Winter's Tale
was performed in promenade, the set consisting of a pair of movable rostra, “audience and acting area joined on a shared floor covered with countless Oriental carpets.”
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The audience were not just bystanders but were “invited to create the billowing shore of Bohemia with a white sheet [and] … sit at
tables with the cast to munch bread and quaff Ribena.”
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“Hermione's [trial] was breathtakingly staged, with innocent queen and jealous king facing each other across half a mile of carpet cordoned off by officious ushers like a royal procession.”
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At the end, the rostra were pushed together to provide a raised acting area for “the beauty and gravity of those final scenes, with the statue coming to life amid flickering candles.”
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5. Autolycus leads in a bear in Ronald Eyre's 1981 production.

Alun Armstrong and Lynn Farleigh were praised for “human-scale” performances, “real warm people under their high tragedy of royal treachery,”
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while Julian Curry's “dignified, mystified Polixenes,”
Janet Dale's “outstandingly notable Paulina, elegant and beautifully spoken,” and Jennifer Landor's “pulsatingly attractive Perdita” were all repeatedly singled out for appreciation.
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Terry Hands' 1986 production showed a clear reaction against former minimalism. The mosaic floor was “covered by a vast polar bear skin, whose huge head stare[d] out at the audience, the play's softness and savagery personified.”
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The backdrop was an enormous fragmented mirror, angled to reflect and duplicate the action. “Regency costumes [were] white—tailcoats, boots and all.”
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Jeremy Irons' youthful Leontes was accompanied by numerous equally youthful attendants in an informal court.

The action opened with a slow-motion snowball fight acted out behind a white gauze and remained informal as the protagonists removed their outerwear and accepted warming drinks. A highly flirtatious Polixenes and Hermione gave ample cause for jealousy, to an extent that undermined the later scenes, yet for once this was a Leontes that hardly needed justification, interpreted as petulant obsessive child unable to control his temper or stop until he had destroyed all around him. The trial appeared to be held in the royal nursery with Irons dragging furniture around to set the scene himself.

A continuing focus on clothing and moments of disguise, underlining the tension between appearance and reality, unified the play, as did repeated use of the bear motif and the doubling of Perdita and Hermione (Penny Downie), though this time at the expense of Perdita's final lines, with a silent stand-in throughout the final scene.

Adrian Noble's main house production, “[crammed] with imaginative detail,”
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was praised as “a real ensemble show, full of pain, wild comedy and hard-won joy”
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and “the best Stratford
Winter's Tale
in two decades.”
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A deceptively simple set from Anthony Ward offered a Sicilia characterized by a versatile gauze box filled with gilt ballroom chairs
and a “Bohemian sheep-shearing that [was] no self-conscious pastoral but a joyous small-town fair with bunting and a brass band.”
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Balloons dominated everything, floating from the chairs for Mamillius' party in Act 1 Scene 1 or providing bawdy humor at the feast in Act 4 Scene 4; Autolycus even made his first appearance descending from above on a tree of green balloons which provided the central focus for Bohemia.

Noble's stage pictures were visually and emotionally powerful, adding depth and narrative; the sweeping circular choreography of the mass entrances and exits unified the production. The play opened with Mamillius alone downstage center, shaking a toy snowstorm to conjure up a birthday party within the gauze box; it ended with Hermione's statue in the same position, looking up at a court staring down at her from the box. Her trial took place “i'th'open air” (3.2.109), backed by solemn attendants bearing umbrellas; “Leontes' defiance called forth Apollo's wrath in a huge storm full of howling wind, scurrying courtiers, lightening and shattered umbrellas skidding madly across the stage.”
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Samantha Bond's queen was “radiantly comfortable in her advanced pregnancy … confident in her husband's love and sensuous in a way that was plainly innocent but capable of being misunderstood,” showing pity rather than anger at her trial, while John Nettles “was not a Leontes who brought his doubts onstage with him; one saw the aberration descend.”
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Greg Doran's production began in darkness to the escalating sound of mocking whispers, as the backlit figure of Leontes in ermine and full regalia processed downstage. Similar soundtracks accompanied later scene changes. Robert Jones' set reflected the sense of claustrophobia: “King Leontes' palace in Sicilia [was] a haunted and haunting place. The walls of the great chamber narrow[ed] towards the back in thrilling perspective … White sheets billow[ed] above like gleaming clouds big with rain, suggesting both the plenitude and the dangers of nature.”
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At the end of the trial, the stage sky literally fell.

Both costuming and interpretation gave this late Victorian/early Edwardian production a strong Ibsenesque flavor. Antony Sher, as
Leontes, based his performance on detailed medical research into psychotic jealousy: he wept and embraced Hermione even as he accused her. Alexandra Gilbreath's Hermione had an unusually distant relationship with the wheelchair-bound Mamillius, but was obviously a loving and devoted wife; her goodness was an active rather than passive force. Like Bond, she offered pity and love rather than anger. London
Times
reviewer Benedict Nightingale wrote of her trial: “[Hermione] has clearly spent weeks on bread and water in some cramped dungeon. This frail sweaty figure speaks with simple humility and utterly unaffected dignity. She has been bitterly wronged—and she is more queen than ever she was.”
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6. An allusion to Our Lady, the Virgin Mary: Hermione's statue (Alexandra Gilbreath) in Gregory Doran's 1999 production.

Bohemia was characterized by piles of wool bales on an industrial scale; Perdita (here doubled with Mamillius by Emily Bruni) was controversially more the shepherd girl than a princess-in-waiting.

The final scene offered a full reconciliation. A torchlit procession entered to find Hermione revealed, downstage left, in the same position as at her trial, and in a similar enclosure, but now head bowed, amid banks of candles, like a statue of the Virgin Mary. “The ending [was] all wonder, humour, forgiveness and joy born out of sadness, … a salvation … both earned and divinely bestowed.”
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Matthew Warchus' Roundhouse production was set in mid-twentieth-century America. It generated praise for the “awesome menace” of Douglas Hodge's shaven-headed Mafia gangster Leontes,
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but the generally bad-tempered reviews were clearly influenced by the critics' dislike of being dragged out of central London to this new venue, as well as by the lengthy technical delays at the start and a cast still uncomfortable with their accents. In a mainly seated auditorium, Warchus had made a brave effort at a promenade element, but this added to the first-night confusion.

The Sicilian sections were dominated by increasing film noir shadows and a sinister soundtrack by Gary Yerson. The proceedings began in a nightclub, all tuxedos, evening gowns, and white tablecloths, with Mamillius as MC providing a symbolic “Lady Vanishes” conjuring trick. The opening dialogue was recast for Leontes and Polixenes and delivered at the microphone before the scene became
more private. Anastasia Hille's “trophy wife” Hermione, “a Midwestern beauty-contest winner of recent and earnest gentility,”
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flirted happily but chastely with Polixenes, and Leontes was obviously controlling anger (and drink) from the start. Act 1 Scene 2 was played in the deserted nightclub, a now pajama-wearing Mamillius running away from Hermione to hide under the table.

From then on, a bare stage and suggestive lighting set the increasingly darkening scene. Even those familiar with the play experienced “a moment of pure terror when … Leontes hurl[ed] the infant Perdita from a high balcony”
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and were “very frightened”
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by the bear. Myra Lucretia Taylor was a forceful Paulina, played here as a Southern black housekeeper. The most powerful scene in this production was the trial: Hermione in prison shift was “tethered to the floor” in the center of an empty stage while her accuser circled her in the darkened auditorium; she resembled “a deer … being used to warm up the dogs in a game of bear-baiting.”
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The statue sequence, however, lacked its usual impact, perhaps partly because the emotional peak had been reached during the first half, perhaps partly because of the detail and liveliness of the “Bohemian” scenes, here transferred to Appalachia, but perhaps owing to the lack of any supra-individual context.