The Winter’s Tale

Abstract

The Winter’s Tale was a bleak, Nordic affair. Two years ago Trevor Nunn set the RSC production somewhere near the Arctic Circle. Robin Phillips’ concept was different yet related. Sicily was a court of Eastern Europe, sometime in the 1880s: polished, artificial, repressed. It was a civilization and its discontents. The critics variously guessed the location as Austro-Hungary, a German or Baltic principality, or Czarist Russia. For me, the Russian elements predominated. Young Mamillius, in white uniform and kneeboots, was clearly a Czarevitch. The soldiers wore long greatcoats, and Paulina a fur hood. The brief scene with the Delphic messengers took place in a railway station à la Anna Karenina. Polixenes, visiting from one of the German states, wore a Maltese cross decoration. An Orthodox priest appeared among the extras. All pointed to the unstated historic metaphor at the heart of the production: the Winter Palace. (Ralph Berry, Shakespeare Quarterly 30 [1979]: 168)KeywordsGerman StateArctic CircleSexual AppealEval MiracleAtypical PerformanceThese keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.