King For A Play
Cymbeline
The Stratford Festival
The National Post
The most wonderful thing about Antoni Cimolino's production of Cymbeline, encompassing all the others, is that it takes the play as it comes, which is no mean feat, as it comes in any number of guises.
Among Shakespeare's plays, it's the ultimate confounder of categories. In the First Folio, the first-ever collected works, it's placed among the tragedies, though hardly anybody in it dies. It has a happy ending, in which long- lost family members get united, as do the central pair of lovers. It can hardly be called a conventional courtship comedy, however, as the lovers in question are already married when the play starts, though people and events conspire to keep them apart for the duration.
It's something of a history play. There really was an ancient British king called Cymbeline, or someone like it, who reigned after the invasion of Julius Caesar; the play shows him refusing to pay tribute to Rome, and getting re-invaded for his pains. This issue, however, only surfaces halfway through the action, and it has to jostle for space with several other plot lines, all of which eventually intersect.
When the Roman army arrives it looks, in this production, exactly as you would expect it to look. It's largely staffed, however, by characters whom we have met earlier as cynical Italians from the Renaissance; and who have also dressed the part. One of them has tried to seduce Cymbeline's daughter Innogen, has been repulsed by her and has lied about it to her husband, who has responded with a murderous rage at least as ugly and graphic as Othello's.
Innogen, by the way, is by current scholarly consensus the name Shakespeare intended for his heroine; all the girls who in subsequent centuries have been christened Imogen apparently owe their names to a Jacobean printer's error. I guess we just have to suck it up. Innogen's reunion with the father who kicked the play off by banishing her husband links it with the other father-daughter plays commonly known as the late romances. The tale it tells is, even by late romantic standards, uncommonly tall, broad and coincidence-crammed. It looks you in the eye and dares you not to believe. This time we do, joyfully.
This is a superb ensemble account of a play with some dozen leading roles. Cymbeline himself seems to owe his title status to rank (again as in a history) rather than intrinsic interest. Geraint Wyn Davies, though, makes a more compelling case for him as the centre of the play than any actor I have seen. We see him at the start, tossing on a bed, appropriating the play's first line. ("You do not meet a man but frowns.") If this is meant to suggest that the whole play is his dream then it doesn't work, because there's no visible payoff, even though beds (not his) are to play a vital part in the subsequent action. But it does enable him to play a grieved and haggard parent, rather than a cardboard tyrant, and even when later scenes force him into more conventional regal mode, there is a conflicted man behind the lines. "Pardon's the word to all," he decrees at the end, and you feel that he includes himself.
Stylistically, the play is a mixture of knotted verse and pungent prose. The production's straightforwardness makes both modes intelligible; its intelligence makes them intense. Graham Abbey's jealous Posthumus is another major piece of reclamation: charming in his initial confidence, overwhelming in his rage and taking on a grave, self-immolating urgency in a repentance that he thinks has come too late; within this comedy there's a near tragic curve.
Cara Ricketts' Innogen starts with some overdone grievance acting, but quickly becomes the most enchanting Shakespearean heroine seen at Stratford in years. She's a woman both capable and ingenuous. In her long scene with Tom McCamus' wily seducer Iachimo, she registers every change of mood; her fairy tale joy when on her way (she thinks) to meet her husband is both heartwarming and heartbreaking. She also, when in male disguise, is as convincing a boy-girl as you could hope to meet.
The Queen, Snow White's stepmother as Lady Macbeth, is a role that starts strongly but peters out; Yanna McIntosh makes the silky most of it while it lasts. Her son Cloten is a far meatier part, a lecherous brainless lout who's a snob and a bully but, disconcertingly, not a coward. Mike Shara makes him unceasingly funny and alarmingly real. The goodies include Brian Tree's bluntly faithful Pisanio, Nigel Bennett's Roman general and Peter Hutt's expositional physician, who takes his Hippocratic oath very seriously.
John Vickery's orotund delivery seems, not for the first time, to come from a different and older world, but that rather suits his role as a banished courtier hanging out in the Welsh wilds, attended by a couple of young noble savages, Ian Lake being the nobler and E. B. Smith the more savage. It's one good performance after another. With the move to the mountains, the production begins to open up visually. This continues with our first sight of the Roman army: the sign of an eagle, aloft and advancing. It seems to be all we need but then, when it comes to the battle, we actually get one: hand-to-hand combats arranged by Todd Campbell, that are not only exciting in themselves but make clear what's supposed to be going on: In my experience of this play, that's a first.
The last scene is a test of a different kind: a non-stop series of revelations and recapitulations at which it's impossible not to laugh. ("O gods," says the doctor, "I left out one thing that the queen confessed.") What's extraordinary is that the laughter turns to tears, of joy: the incredible becomes its own magic. It only works, though, if we care for the people in the story. Here we do, richly. This is a production that trusts its audience, trusts its actors, trusts the play, and meets all its challenges.