The Winter's Tale (Le conte d'hiver) (review)

Abstract

Reviewed by: The Winter's Tale (Le conte d'hiver) Nathalie Rivere De Carles The Winter's Tale (Le conte d'hiver) Presented by Théâtre Vidy-Lausanne (Switzerland) at the Théâtre National de Toulouse, Toulous, France. October 14–18, 2009. Translated by Bernard-Marie Koltès. Directed by Lilo Baur. Scenography Lilo Baur and James Humphrey. Costumes Agnès Falque. Lighting Nicolas Widmer. Music Michel Ochowiak. With Hélène Cattin (Paulina, Dorcas), Gabriel Chamé Buendia (Mamilius, Clown), Ludovic Chazaud (Florizel, Archidamus, Cleomenes), Pascal Dujour (Polixenes, Antigonus), Michel Ochowiak (Autolycus), Kostas Philippoglou (Leontes, Old Shepherd), Renata Ramos Maza (Hermione, Mopsa), Ximo Solano (Camillo, Dion), and Gaia Termopoli (Perdita, Emilia). The Winter's Tale is a fable about the lethal entrapment of a man in his own mental labyrinth of jealousy. Lilo Baur quotes La Rochefoucauld's maxim that "Jealousy is twin-born with love, but does not always die with love" as the main inspiration for her scenography. Her adaptation of Koltes's translation of Shakespeare's play focused on the carnivalesque expression of obsessive love when replaced by blind jealousy. The maze of Leontes's mind canceled time and became a place of eternal jealousy and suffering. Koltes's Leontes was the wounded Minotaur at the center of his prison of shame, destroying the landmarks of reason and reinventing a world predicated on negative logic and paradox: "People can be at logger-heads without having a feud, people can kill without a reason; hostility is unreasonable" (Koltes, Le conte d'hiver, Paris: Editions de Minuit, 1988). Baur chose to express the disjointedness of Leontes's mind by creating a scenography predicated on the dream and the spatial rendering of an intimate labyrinth. Such a choice enabled her to articulate the twofold atmosphere of the play and to tie together the dangerous mundus inversus of Leontes's jealousy and the fertile charivari of the shepherds by showing them as the theatrical expressions of the labyrinthine bivium. However, The Winter's Tale's dual structure was not staged in the usual succession of a tragic first part and of a comic second half, but as a dream constantly interlacing tragedy and comedy. This simultaneity of the dramatic genres was enabled through the dramatization of another genre: the fable. Baur took the play's title literally and used it as a comprehensive frame for Shakespeare's subtle mistreatment of the dramatic genres. She retained two features of the fable: the presence of a fleeting narrative voice and the superimposition of reality [End Page 301] and oneirism. That production of the Winter's Tale offered a radically different approach to the original play as it transformed it into a fable encapsulating the Shakespearean plot. In order to create such an aesthetic embedding, Baur relied on Koltes's creation of a choric character in his translation-adaptation of the play, and on an oneiric onstage materiality: the set became a Russian nesting-doll structure where the recurring presence of the same actor's body playing several parts would guide the spectators through the tale. The stage was an empty black box with open wings and an immense wall at the back. The variations in space would be guaranteed by the use of movables (two sets of screens, a large carpet), and by the potential dislocations of the back wall. Baur's scenographical choices created a multi-layered stage who could present the audience with a puzzling spatiality where she could introduce Koltes's choric character as a visual Ariadne's thread. Following Koltes, Baur developed the tale-telling potential of Shakespeare's Mamilius and turned him into a choric character. But while other more classic productions present Mamilius as a simple observer, Baur reworked the character through the adult body of the actor playing the part (Gabriel Chamé Buendia). The play began with the entrance of Mamilius as a man dressed in a boy's 1900s-style sailor costume. Mamilius, the man-boy, declared "It's a tale" while an invisible hand moved a set of screens upstage and revealed successively Leontes, Hermione, and Polixenes, who started moving like automatons. Mamilius was that strange liminal figure leading both the mechanical actors and...