The Bard's Board Game

Cymbeline
Royal Shakespeare Company
The Observer

A strange kind of record was set up at Stratford-on-Avon this week. Cymbeline became the thirty-seventh, ergo the last, Shakespeare play to be fitted out with its own magazine programme. These engaging publications, combining glossy texts and textual glosses, have been a Stratford feature since 1963. It happens that the last RSC Cymbeline was in 1962.

One can see why they have waited so long to bring it back. The play is a programme editor’s nightmare. There is no questions of summarizing its plot, as is customary, in a couple of trenchant paragraphs. The legend (as our forefathers would most appropriately have designated it) is accorded a triple-page spread. The reader makes his way through 14 episodes linked together by a series of wavy lines, the whole resembling a particularly eventful Waddington’s board game.

This concept of Cymbeline as a game any umber can play is reflected in the tone of the production which is, for the company, unusually relaxed. The directors- referred to officially as ‘John Barton with Barry Kyle and Clifford Williiams’ and hereinafter as Mr Barton- tell their story clearly, relishing each stroke of fortune in the hope that blessedness will descend with the final curtain. There is an intense and poignant pleasure to be gleaned form the disposal of events at the end of a Shakespearean comedy, a pleasure amply afforded by Mr Barton’s productions of Twelfth Night and All’s Well that Ends Well, two of the richest evenings I have spent in the theatre.

Neither production though,  came into this glory until it arrived at the Aldwych. At their Stratford openings they were both muted; which leads me to hope that the consummation of this Cymbeline is yet to be achieved. On Tuesday the finale faced us with a long line of actors trying their best to look mystically radiant( this, after all, is one of the Last Romances), but succeeding only in looking determined. Ian Richardson as Iachimo came off bet: he had a handy piece of scaffolding to lean on, which breeds relaxation, and besides he has uncommonly piercing eyes.

There is a surprising faintness about much of the acting in this scene at the moment. I suspect, too, that Mr Barton has attempted to put pressure on one of the aspects of the play least able to sustain it; Sebastian Shaw, playing the least rewarding title-role in Shakespeare, is decked out (for is he not Liking of Britain?) In the golden robe which our native monarchs are wearing at Stratford this year on ceremonial occasions. For Cymbeline there are few enough of these; most of the time he is under the thumb of his wicked Queen and is forced to wear a silvery-grey gown, whose main distinction is that it perfectly matches his beard; one flows into the other so that he looks like Father Time.

Finally released from marital tyranny, he celebrates his independence be re-establishing Britain as a fully paid up tributary of the Roman Empire. This he does with his author’s and director’s apparent approval. (When King John bound himself to Rome earlier this season, Mr Barton rewarded him with a custard pie in the face. Values change.) Heaven knows what the Jacobean audience made of this ending; perhaps their classical education outweighed their celebrated patriotism.

The point must be that fealty to Rome equals piety towards Jupiter, the play’s presiding deity who makes a brief personal appearance, quelling the murmurings of lesser apparitions with a voice supposedly of thunder while stylishly riding inside a golden eagle. Meanwhile back on earth Sheila Allen as the Queen enjoys herself being evil (with a clear conscience, since nobody but her husband believes a word she says); Charles Keating as Cloten struts about like a rooster, his multi-coloured plumage gorgeous but diseased; Tony Church as Belarius watches proudly and resonantly over a couple of stolen princelings whom he has apparently brought up as Red Indians; and a new leading character takes the stage.

This is the physician Cornelius, for whom, in Jeffery Dench’s performance, medicine is the merest sideline; he also tells fortunes and is a most active First Gentleman, i.e., one who retails the story so far to a Second Gentleman, who responds with such concise and truthful remarks as ‘I am dumb.’ Cornelius so thrives on this persona that he begins to adopt the same tone towards us, and finally takes to reading the stage directions for the last-act battle, which is simultaneously being fought upstage and nearly invisible.

Here I quarrel with Mr Barton; the battle is a decisive factor in the action, and in the destinies of many of the characters, and water the difficulties (and they are immense) we need to get a good look at it. We need for example to see the disarming and partial repentance of Iachimo, if only so that we may be reminded of his existence before the end. Earlier on Mr Richardson reveals that Iachimo’s best scene (and perhaps the best in the play) is neither his attempted section of Imogen, nor his bedchamber soliloquy, but his bating of Posthumus. This becomes a refined version of central duet in Othello; Tim Piggott-Smith, a tightly confident Posthumus, burns towards jealously on a slow fuse, though he lacks passion for the grossness of our hero’s imaginings when once the fit is on him. What Susan Fleetwood’s fiery, witty and radiant Imogen is supposed to see in him remains inexplicable. I expect her performance to grow with the production from meritorious to triumphant. She helps it to look good, as do a multitude of white and gold traverse curtains. The designers (another trio) only go berserk in the wilderness near Milford Haven, which they have backed with a large bent drainpipe and populated with small silvery mounds of the kind which traditionally house sinister visitors from outer space.