The Bard's Not-So-Holiday Play: This Winter's Tale is a Seasonal Offering in Name Only
The Winter’s Tale
Theatre Kingston
The National Post
Shakespeare never wrote a Christmas play. Neither, as far as I can determine, did any of his contemporaries. Elizabethan England was an aggressively Christian society, to the extent of imposing fines and worse on any citizen who stayed home on a Sunday. But this didn't mean the popular theatre was expected to dramatize Biblical stories, or to deal explicitly with Christian themes; the whole idea smacked of blasphemy. There was even legislation forbidding the mention of God's name. Subject for Discussion: Religious censorship always undoes itself since it inevitably fosters secular-humanist entertainment.
That's not to say that Elizabethan and Jacobean playwrights, soaked as they were in Christian ideas, didn't automatically include them in their plays. Obvious examples are Shakespeare's last plays, which tell stories of resurrection and reconciliation. For Christmas associations, The Winter's Tale, at Harbourfront's Brigantine Room, recommends itself, if only by its title. As it turns out, though, it is only by its title. The semi-professional group Theatre Kingston has brought the play to Toronto as a seriously seasonal offering. The production is good, but it doesn't make its advertised case.
It starts with a string band playing carols, and ends with all the actors harmonizing on “Once in Royal David's City”, some of them in tune and others not. Both top and tail are, of course, pasted on. Within the actual play there are occasional iconic gestures. The costumes are Victorian, which gets us thinking Dickens. The court of Sicilia initially boasts a couple of Christmas decorations; when the action darkens, when the crazed king Leontes orders his wife, Hermione, dragged off to prison on suspicion of adultery, the holly wreaths get dragged too. When Hermione is displayed as a statue in the magical last scene, she's in a Madonna pose.
Then there is the young prince Mamillius, who says "a sad tale's best for winter" and who dies of a broken heart when his mother is put on trial. In this production, he hangs around posthumously, holding a teddy bear. He also gets to speak the mid-play chorus, which gives us crucial information, here drowned out by guitar accompaniment. He is around to cast a blessing on the finale and generally acts like a Christ-child.
This is Sunday-school sentimentality, and it contradicts the play. Leontes, after 16 years' penance, gets back a lot, including his wife and the baby daughter he left to die of exposure. But he doesn't get back his son. Some things can't be atoned for.
"Thou met'st with things dying," says the old shepherd at the play's turning point, "I with things new-born." If the text suggests any Christian festival, it's not Christmas but Easter, whatever the weather. But, as usual in Shakespeare, the myths are mixed. One character glancingly compares himself to Judas, but the play's official deity is pagan Apollo, and Leontes' crowning folly is to disobey the Delphic oracle.
The strengths of Craig Walker's production are intelligence, intensity and -- in a space not generally employed for anything larger than a poetry reading -- intimacy. Royal Sicilia is signified by a carpet; rustic Bohemia by a rug.
The play, contrary to critical tradition and the director's program note, emerges most compellingly as psychological realism. At least, it does in Matthew Gibson's performance of Leontes. This is a paradox; Leontes is a notoriously unrealistic character whose jealousy, as in a fairy-tale, flares up out of nowhere five minutes after his first entrance. Gibson does his best to pave the way by imbuing his initial speeches with a suspicious sneer; once inside his fantasy, he is riveting. Each self-torturing image comes drenched in sweet reasonableness, every outside attempt to argue with his obsession pushes him deeper into it. This is paranoia defined, a gnarled and treacherous script superbly navigated, keywords pounced on and illuminated without ever halting the flow. He's less successful with the repentant king, whom he plays on a single beatific note that's initially arresting but turns swiftly sanctimonious, and I don't know how he'd manage on a bigger stage; but in the first half his Leontes is almost -- not quite -- the best I have seen.
None of the other performances compare, including Gibson's own double as the young shepherd, a.k.a., Clown. In fact, the pastoral scenes flop. The Autolycus (Ivan Sherry) is in the audience's face without ever making contact, while the young lovers have little charm and no finesse. The last redemptive movement makes little sense because we don't believe in the redeemers, including, back at court, a Paulina who's less a moral fury than a nag. Hermione (Jennifer Roblin) plays her trial scene with quiet power, and the good Camillo (Peter Aston) is nicely professorial, fittingly so since by day the actor is a professor, of microbiology and immunology, which must be another source for good. That the play both preaches and exemplifies charity is undeniable, but the shiver it unfailingly provokes when the statue comes to life pre-dates Christianity. It's ancestral.