The Winter’s Tale

Abstract

Reviewed by: The Winter’s Tale Pascale Aebischer The Winter’s TalePresented by Cheek by Jowl at the Silk Street Theatre, Barbican, London, UK. 04 5– 22, 2017. Directed by Declan Donnellan. Designed by Nick Ormerod. Lighting design by Judith Greenwood. Music and sound design by Paddy Cunneen. With Grace Andrews (Emilia/Time), Joseph Black (Cleomenes), David Carr (Camillo), Tom Cawte (Mamillius), Ryan Donaldson (Autolycus), Guy Hughes (Dion), Orlando James (Leontes), Sam McArdle (Young Shepherd), Eleanor McLoughlin (Perdita), Peter Moreton (Old Shepherd/Antigonus), Natalie Radmall-Quirke (Hermione/Dorcas), Joy Richardson (Paulina/Mopsa), Edward Sayer (Polixenes), and Sam Woolf (Florizel). The following review continues our recurring series of “Second Looks,” in which reviewers who enjoy an especially intimate relationship to a play or company—for example, those who have edited its text, directed a production of it, or have published elsewhere on the company and its productions—revisit productions we have previously reviewed from their own area of expertise or academic interest. Here, Pascale Aebischer, who has written on Cheek by Jowl’s media work, reviews the company’sThe Winter’s Tale, previously reviewedin Shakespeare Bulletin by Justin B. Hopkins. A woman in a red coat sits on a long green bench with her back to the audience. The lights go down. The lights go up. A man sits on a bench facing the audience. As the light intensifies and music builds up into a thunderclap, his handsome face acquires ever deeper shadows until the outlines of the skull beneath his skin make his eyes disappear into their sockets. The opening dumb show of Cheek by Jowl’s The Winter’s Talestaged the ravages of Time—personified as the woman in the red coat—as played out over the features of Orlando James’s Leontes. It presented the play as the tragedy of a mismatch between Leontes’s attractive features and his inner corruption. In its substitution of Leontes’s body for that of female Time, it furthermore brought to the fore how Shakespeare’s play itself maximizes the attention to Leontes’s [End Page 721]anguish, remorse, and eventual redemption by removing alternative focal points from view, killing off Mamillius and making Hermione “die” offstage. In his review of this touring production on its stopover in New York in Shakespeare Bulletin35.2, Justin B. Hopkins takes his lead from the dumb show and focuses attention on the production’s immature, impulsive, psychologically imbalanced and dangerously abusive Leontes. As James performed him, Leontes was a man of muscular action and violent emotion: he wrestled with Polixenes, manipulated his friend’s and Hermione’s bodies into smiling and copulating, slapped his son, sobbed, grovelled, and knelt in a final tentative embrace of his wife and daughter. Hermione, in Hopkins’s account of the production, was passive: silent in the face of Leontes’s accusation, the victim of his vicious physical assault that led to Perdita’s premature birth, and an almost incidental contributor to the pathos of Leontes’s emotions in the final scene. But there is another way of reading the production that complements Hopkins’s account. Donnellan and Ormerod are known for putting troubled familial dynamics and complex female characters center stage and for creating physical tableaux in which emotional relationships are visualized through gesture and spatial configurations, as they did in their productions of Measure for Measure, ’Tis Pity She’s a Whore, and The Changeling(for accounts of these productions, see Aebischer; Mentz; Menzer). Taking a lead from this, I want to focus on Natalie Radmall-Quirke’s Hermione and consider the story this production tells through her stillness and her body’s placement in relation to the bodies of others. When Hermione first appeared, heavily pregnant yet in court shoes sitting on the bench next to Leontes, the upright elegance and reserve of her bearing indicated a life led permanently in the limelight. The discernible strain in her manner as she asked Polixenes to stay, and her quick glances to Leontes to check how he would respond, suggested an anxiety over pleasing her husband that might indicate a longer history of abuse. When Leontes embarrassed his reluctant guest by pulling him into...