The Plot's the Thing
Cymbeline
The Stratford Festival
The National Post
As many people must have noticed, the Shakespeare plays that most move an audience are not the great tragic ones that are officially supposed to. I don't think I have ever cried a drop at Hamlet or Macbeth, and though I have shed tears at King Lear they have not been at the tragic finale but at the reconciliation of Lear and Cordelia that comes a whole act earlier and constitutes a kind of false happy ending.
It's the epiphanies, genuine or bogus, that get you every time, which means the plays that most reliably tickle the tear ducts are the comedies, and it sometime seems that the more improbable or convoluted their resolutions are, the more power they have. The most bizarre of all is Cymbeline, a fairy tale trying to pass itself off as a history. Its new Stratford production, only the third in the theatre's history, certainly choked me up, and I mean that in a very good way.
There is more sheer story in Cymbeline than in any other Shakespeare play, including a sizeable amount of stuff that has happened before the curtain goes up. Imogen, daughter of Cymbeline, a vestigially historical king of ancient Britain, has married a poor but valiant gentleman named Posthumus whom her furious father has now banished. Cloten, the king's loutish stepson, has been paying court to Imogen, egged on by the Queen, his transparently evil mother. Meanwhile, or rather a long time ago, Imogen's own two brothers have vanished, stolen in infancy.
All of this is explained in the first scene by a First Gentleman, who like all first gentlemen knows everything, to a Second Gentleman, whose ignorance is, even by second gentleman standards, phenomenal. David Latham's production gets rid of him, and turns the entire exposition into a monologue, delivered by a young actor, Kyle Blair, who subsequently appears as a soothsayer, a singer (for the heavenly aubade "hark, hark, the lark") and Jupiter, who makes a late visionary appearance, supposedly perched on an eagle. He is, in short, the play's hotline to the supernatural, a function he discharges with charm, even though I suspect someone older and more waggish might have better filled the bill.
I rather wish Latham had not backed off from the gentlemen's scene as written, if only because its bald-faced outrageousness sets the tone for much of the play. One of its author's last works, it's full of shameless theatrical devices, many of which echo characters and situations in the earlier ones. Harold Bloom, writing with his customary blend of brilliance and pig-headedness, has convinced himself that the play is a sustained essay in self-parody. I don't see how any production could hope to get this across, and I suspect Shakespeare was merely enjoying himself working the conventions, laughing with but not at them. He comes across as a mellow master who is mostly holding his material at arm's length but who can sometimes find himself overwhelmingly involved with it.
He certainly piles on the styles. The action stretches to include an invasion of Britain by the forces of Rome, whose general bears the twice-Latin appellation of Caius Lucius but whose staff officers seem to be a far later breed of Italian, with names ending in a vowel. One of them, Iachimo, is a major-league Jacobean villain, who makes a wager with the exiled Posthumus on his wife's chastity and goes to great duplicitous lengths to make it appear that he's won. There are also scenes in the Welsh mountains, where the king's lost sons have been brought up as extraordinarily noble savages, and where, inter alia, they deliver the most exquisite dirge in the English language over a character who happens not to be dead.
In narrative terms the bits all fit together with fiendish, seemingly casual ingenuity. Making them belong to the same dramatic world is another matter, and productions tend either to place the whole thing within some kind of unifying scenic frame or to play each component for its own value as vividly as possible. Latham takes the latter course, and generally succeeds; visually, the production is no particular shakes (though it offers an unusually intelligible staging of the oddest battle scene in Shakespeare), but it confirms its director's talent for dealing lucidly with wildly difficult texts.
To play the Wicked Stepmother he has Martha Henry, at her silkiest; she wears a fur collar and carries a pet ferret, making it hard to tell where one ends and the other begins. Nobody would be taken in by her for a moment, but then hardly anybody in the play is. She is able, through sheer mastery of words and the spaces between them, to build solid relationships with other characters, most notably her unsavoury son, in which role Ron Kennell gives the tastiest performance of the evening.
This Cloten is the ultimate spoiled child, very funny as a vain fool, he is also dangerous, not least to himself. Imogen tells him that her husband's "meanest garment" means more to her than Cloten's whole person, and he obsesses on the phrase, thereby activating not just a fetish but a whole extra plotline. I have never seen this played half as entertainingly or half as convincingly.
Claire Jullien doesn't dominate the play as Imogen is traditionally supposed to; but she acts with delicacy and strength and a surprising humour: "I see a man's life is a tedious one" she remarks in her male disguise ( I must have mentioned the male disguise), and delights the house. She also masters the more testing tragi-comedy of waking up beside what she takes to be her husband's headless corpse; this is Shakespeare milking a situation to its absurd limits, as was the fashion among his younger contemporaries, and then transcending it.
Her two major male foils fall short, though in opposite ways. Dion Johnstone shows promise as Iachimo, but mere promise in so juicy a role hardly cuts it; he looks more smooth-tongued than he sounds. If Iachimo is a gift of a part, the jealous Posthumus is a pill, a character who pushes to the limit the convention that, however foully a hero may behave, he's still a hero.
Dan Chameroy rages energetically but looks disconcertingly sulky. He seems in fact like more of a Cloten; since the two men are said to take the same size in clothes and are never on stage together, maybe they should be doubled. (Makes at least as much sense as doubling Theseus and Oberon.)
Of the other young actors, Gordon S. Miller likewise shows promise as the younger lost boy, and Stephen Gartner definite achievement as the elder. As their guardian, Stephen Russell sports a beard and manner apparently left over from his Mennonite performance in last year's Quiet in the Land; as the faithful servant Pisanio, Bernard Hopkins is a ministering angel who gets progressively stronger as he flutters progressively less. Old reliables on the margins are Brian Tree and, as an enchantingly urbane family doctor, Ian Deakin. Which leaves Cymbeline himself, a title character who has far more title than character. James Blendick plays him with booming stolidity, which turns out to be an advantage. The king spends the last scene hearing the plot unravelled and having his family restored to him. He has a lot to respond to and, rather than trying to make each reaction top its predecessor Blendick greets each with level delight, rather as we do. It's the family reunions that make these comic denouements so deeply effective; boy getting girl is nothing, but wife restored to husband (Imogen is the only heroine to go married through an entire play), brothers to sister and, above all in Shakespeare, daughter to father -- these have the power of myth.
We believe because, against all the odds, we want to believe; there is no way for the multiple revelations of Cymbeline not to be funny, but that only adds to their joy. Anyway, that's how it works here: Mine eyes, as someone says in the similarly impossible All's Well That Ends Well, smell onions.