Frightened by Furies

Love’s Labour’s Lost, Cymbeline
Royal Shakespeare Company
The Observer

This belongs with the immortal remark of Constable Dull in Love’s Labour’s Lost (Aldwych); charged with not having spoken a word, he replies ‘nor understood none neither.’ That always gets the loudest laugh of the play, though in John Barton’s production- which will do until perfection comes along- it has stiff competition.

This is as it should be; their predicament - ensnared by their own pretensions, the victims of desire and of mortality- is prototypically comic. If there is not sadder scene in Shakespeare than the message of death that wrecks, the accumulated masquerade, there is none funnier than the lords’ sequential realization- piling face on irony- that they are all in love and all forsworn.

Richard Griffith’s tubby King, agonizingly shy, is a glorious joke: though to appreciate if fully you may need to know how straight the role is usually played, and how much further down the social scale Mr Griffiths is usually cast. This is in no way to impugn its essential truth, matched by that of Carmen du Sautoy’s Princess, whose final transformations - grief, disillusion, anger, charity- are triumphantly done. Tony Church now plays Armado- a shabbier, more mournful Don than he offered in David Jone’s production last time round. 

Meanwhile Mr Jones has staged Cymbeline (Stratford). The programme contains enough quotations about dreams for us to believe that this was his governing concept, the dreamer presumably being Griffith Jones’s blind Soothsayer, alone on the stage at beginning and end and crumbling Jupiter’s prophecy with a gesture I rook to be contemptuous. There seems at least to be an acerbic eve , to the production throughout. Jeffery Dench’s Cymbeline is played as an ineffectual tyrant (married to a wife from North Finchley, judge by the sound of her) and the play’s many references to the ‘gentry’ are curtly underlined. (Mind you, the contrastingly noble savages do turn out to be princes in disguise.)

I wondered if Mr Jones had been reading Edward Bond, who sees the play as ‘an appalling slapstick rehash of King Lear’ and whether a class-conscious version of a play obsessed with the differences between ‘court’ and country might not work better in Jacobean dress than in the legendary-nondescript get-up affected here. Even Judi Dench plays Imogen’s bad temper (she’s always getting at people, often with some provocation) for all it’s worth, leaving enchantment to take care of itself - as, with her around, if infallibly does.

Roger Rees digs deeper into Posthumus’s jealously than is customary and Bob Peck rather surprisingly essays the epicene as Cloten. He looks like the Jolly Green Giant and sounds retarded. The company is full of good actors (and, on this showing, at least one terrible one), but they have yet to draw together. Neither does Mr Jones’s productions really cohere, but I preferred it to Mr Barton’s rather bland version, also last time around.