Authors: William Shakespeare
Michael Billington felt James “emerge[d] superbly as a tough, strong-jawed woman full of irony and anger,”
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also seeing the production’s more nuanced and mature vision of character in Basil Hendon’s Belarius, whom Billington praised for making the character “not some wayside preacher but a figure of golden-voiced stoicism.”
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This led, naturally, to an increased sense of the real dangers of the fragile psyches now seen behind what had for so long seemed cardboard cutout characters:
Ken Stott’s Cloten is not simply comic but a dangerous regal thug. Peter Woodward discovers in Posthumus an insecure neurotic who lapses into Leontes-like madness when he believes Innogen has betrayed him.
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In 2001 the play was staged at Shakespeare’s Globe in an experimental six-man version, with Mark Rylance playing both Cloten and Posthumus and Jane Arnfield as Innogen. Arnfield was noted to move “with a stylised grace: at one point she cartwheels with joy,”
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while Rylance brought superb comedy to his Cloten, playing it “like an early version of Caliban—or a Grizzly baby walking bandy-legged in uncomfortable nappies.”
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The complexity and psychological danger of both Cloten and Posthumus, so evident in Hall’s production, were here jettisoned in favor of a more straightforward hero/villain dichotomy, with Susannah Clapp actually referring to “the hero Posthumus,” played by Rylance as “Cloten’s graceful, muted counterpart, making you feel he’s whispering secrets in your ear.”
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Charles Spencer also noted of the design:
Simplicity rules. The cast all wear the same pyjama-like white costumes, there is no scenery, and much of the Globe’s gilded decoration has been covered. The cast also occasionally act as
narrators, briefly setting the scene and describing who they are, so that the complex narrative is developed with satisfying clarity.
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That same year saw New York company Theatre for a New Audience bring the play to Stratford in a magnificent reimagining of the play, characterized by a “disciplined and generous-spirited eclecticism” which took in cowboys and kabuki.
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Rachel Kavanaugh staged a modern-dress, open-air version at Regent’s Park in 2005, the reviews somewhat reflective of a play that had been welcomed into the repertory now that critics had accepted its playful vacillation between reality and self-conscious fantasy:
The play’s politics and its fraught romantic entanglements are deftly caught, and Kavanaugh is responsive too to the changes of mood in a work that constantly juxtaposes the beautiful and the ugly, the real and the mythic.
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The play returned to the stage in 2007 in Declan Donnellan’s acclaimed Cheek by Jowl production, starring Tom Hiddleston, again doubling the roles of Posthumus and Cloten, and Jodie McNee as Innogen. It was another minimalist, modern-dress affair, though the company’s trademark conspicuous theatricality and informal relationship with the audience brought the play’s imaginative excesses vividly to life, with the production achieving “a spell-binding imaginative unity”
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that made perfect sense of a play too long marginalized by critics unsure what to do with it:
The handling of the potentially ridiculous crescendo of coincidences and reunions in the final scene is quite masterly. At each turn, we see people struggling to adjust to bewildering new realities and the mood at the end is expertly mixed, allowing a sense that some things cannot be resolved to complicate the atmosphere of wonder and spiritual transcendence.
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Cymbeline
has been filmed a handful of times, first as an illustrated sequence of seven slides in the 1890s, followed by a twenty-two-minute
silent film version of 1913 produced by the Thanhouser film company. It starred Florence La Badie as Innogen and James Cruze as Posthumus, and relied heavily on wordy exposition and “a striking number of screened letters in an attempt to clarify and explain the action.”
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A German film version followed in 1925, directed by Ludwig Berger, and the play was filmed again in Germany in 2000 as
Cymbelin
, directed by Dieter Dorn. But its major outing on celluloid in the twentieth century was in Elijah Moshinsky’s star-studded BBC version, with Helen Mirren as Innogen, Michael Pennington as Posthumus, Claire Bloom as the Queen, Robert Lindsay as Iachimo, and Richard Johnson as Cymbeline. It was in the main a low-budget, studio-bound affair, as was the rest of the BBC series, but Moshinsky attempted to overcome these constraints by claustrophobically containing most of the action within windowless interior sets, in part a pragmatic decision because exteriors “look dreadful in the studio, so phoney,”
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though partly to suggest a stifling isolation within the court. Moshinsky also felt there was a tension between the domestic and the political within the play and wanted to emphasize the former, as well as engaging the audience visually with “Shakespeare’s world.” The sets were in fact high Renaissance in the style of interiors found in the works of the Dutch masters, which “not only look authentic on television but suit television’s conventional pressure towards domestication.”
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The production was well received, and Mirren’s performance was praised as being “as good as anything she has done on television”:
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The trouble with Imogen … is that she normally seems too good to be true in a world where nothing is what it seems, where the outward impression never matches the inner nature. [Mirren] overcomes this with what Moshinsky calls her “sexual voltage” and by showing her discovery, invisible even to her tempter Iachimo, that she is corruptible, open to seduction. She is far from the usual idea of a porcelain idol on a pedestal.
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Cymbeline
is unlike any other play in the canon in that its many lives onstage, and the many critical responses these lives have engendered, have been as focused on justifying engagement with
what seems like a baffling, inconsequential narrative as on the desire simply to reinterpret a complex artwork. Productions of the play—far less frequent than with the more central of Shakespeare’s works—have almost all been labors of love, while responses have often been characterized by trepidation on the part of critics perennially unsure how to approach it as a piece of drama. It is either a tangled mess of inconsequentiality; a fairy-tale world inhabited by unreal and unconvincing characters; or an ethereal and haunting masterwork played out by some of the most complex creations of Shakespeare’s career. What is certain is that this too-neglected masterpiece has, justly, enjoyed something of a renaissance in recent decades by directors willing to accept that the play needs no apology. Neither have the best productions striven to take the play “on its own terms,” as no healthy interpretation would presume to know what they are. Rather, acceptance of
Cymbeline
as a worthy and rewarding stage vehicle has ensured that directors, performers, reviewers, and audiences will keep returning to it with a sense of expectancy and wonder.
Cymbeline
is commonly regarded as the strangest of Shakespeare’s plays. It reworks the themes of the other late romances, or lyrical dramas—loss and trial, recovery and reunion, forgiveness and redemption—with an extraordinary freedom, drawing eclectically on elements of myth, legend, and folktale and clothing them in some of his most highly developed verse. Set in ancient Britain during the early Roman Empire, it also wanders unashamedly into Renaissance Europe; categorized as a romance, it recklessly juxtaposes the tragic, the comic, and the grotesque; above all, it employs almost every plot device available to the dramatist. Its cast includes kidnapped infants, star-crossed lovers, a wicked stepmother, a deceived king, an oafish villain and a smooth one, ghosts and gods, while its plot involves attempted poisonings, plots against a princess’s honor and life, revenges, murders, battles, disguises, wild coincidences, and multiple reunions. To some it is a “glorious mishmash,”
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while others join Dr. Johnson in deploring its “unresisting imbecility.” What is certain
is that it is an enticing play for a director, offering challenge and opportunity. There is no such thing as a “standard” production of
Cymbeline;
each director comes to the play afresh, to find a consistency in its diverse elements and to negotiate the minefield of its booby-trapped plot. There have been seven productions of the play for the RSC since 1961: four at the Royal Shakespeare Theatre, two at the Swan, and one at The Other Place.
Finding a Theme
1962, 1974, 1987, 1997—telling a story
When William Gaskill directed the play in 1962, he came fresh from directing Brecht’s
The Caucasian Chalk Circle
and the Brechtian influence was clear. The theatricality of the performance was made overt, the play’s story being performed to a group of scene shifters, who carried on appropriate scenery as required, with the stage lights up. Although quite unremarkable now, for audiences used to scene changes performed behind closed curtains or in a stage blackout, this was a radical departure, consistent with the extremes and improbabilities of the play’s plot. Don Chapman of the
Oxford Mail
noted, “the scene shifters very gently attempt to prepare us for the excesses of theatrical contrivance which are to come.”
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There was no Brechtian alienation in the actors’ performances, however, which were naturalistic and wholehearted.
Several subsequent productions adopted the storytelling approach: in the 1974 production, on an almost bare stage, John Barton, working with Barry Kyle and Clifford Williams, turned the play even more overtly into a piece of storytelling. Barton cut 820 lines from the text and developed the minor character of Cornelius into a narrator. Jeffery Dench in the role read out stage directions from the First Folio text and guided the audience through the story, much as Gower does in
Pericles
, preparing them for the abrupt shifts from horror to pathos to comedy. It was an approach welcomed by the critics: “[they] turned the unwieldy fable into moving and even magical theatrical experience”;
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“swift, romantic. Poetic and dashing”;
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“a production full of colour, fantasy and magic.”
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In 1987, Bill Alexander took the pared-down storytelling approach a step further in his studio production at The Other Place.
Here, the actors gave a fireside telling of the tale within a circle of audience, and often engaged with the audience, sitting in spare seats among them. Andrew Rissik, in the
Independent
, eloquently described the mood of the production:
At The Other Place is a joyous and deeply affecting production. Bill Alexander has directed it as a glowing yeoman fairy-tale where the gracious dignity of historical legend gets an added lustre from homespun country wisdom and down-to-earth folklore … The lighting, done in burnished golds and autumnal reds, leaves the stage basking in sunny magic. Although the action darts with deft complexity between Machiavelli’s Italy, Celtic Britain and the Roman Empire, we are plainly somewhere in Warwickshire, in the bright, wooded landscape which always haunted Shakespeare’s imagination.
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In place of conventional sound effects, Ilona Sekacz wrote a vivid score, performed by the actors on instruments ranging from steel drums and wind chimes to the bared wires of an old piano.
In 1997, Adrian Noble followed John Barton in cutting a thousand lines of text and replacing the scene-setting dialogue between two Gentlemen in the first scene with a prologue which more clearly established the characters and situation. The prologue was spoken by the Soothsayer to the cast, again as a fireside tale. Noble sidestepped the mix of historical periods in the play by transferring the story to samurai Japan, finding a unifying setting which emphasized the play’s celebration of aristocratic and martial values, of blood and birth, as well as finding a new context for its magical qualities. Charles Spencer found this “the most rewarding production on the RSC’s main stage since the 1993
King Lear
with Robert Stephens.”
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1979—splintered reality
David Jones’ production, rather than seeking to knit up the disparate strands of the play, allowed it to unravel with the disjointed realism of a dream. Rather than striving to smooth out the absurdities of plot, he allowed the comedy to become overt and run alongside the
pathos. Critics tended to find his approach too anarchic: “I do not sense the imaginative unity that can hold the play together.”
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2001—“generous-hearted eclecticism or wilful zaniness?”
The New York–based company Theater for a New Audience brought a production to The Other Place that sharply divided both audiences and critics. Director Bartlett Sher made no attempt to find unity in the play’s disparate elements but rather reveled in its discontinuities, offering a “gorgeously multicultural” experience
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or, alternatively, one which was “mischievously weird.”
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In Sher’s hands, Britain was Japan as depicted by Hokusai, a stiffly formal world in which the action was played out on a black and scarlet platform, but when Innogen and her attendant had battled their way through a swirling snowstorm with only their black parasols as weapons, they found that Milford Haven was not just in the west but in the Wild West, complete with Stetsons, drawls, and plaintive, plunking country music, which included a touching country version of “Fear no more the heat o’th’sun.”
At least two critics celebrated the chutzpah of the production’s irreverence: “winning chutzpah”
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wrote Paul Taylor, and “endearing chutzpah” Rachel Halliburton, who commented too that “there is something both wonderful and terrible about its bouncily irreverent way with one of Shakespeare’s lesser dramas.”
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“Kitsch” was a word critics reached for too, but while Dominic Cavendish complained that “it brings occidental and oriental influences into kitsch collision,”
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Paul Taylor declared that the move to the guitar-plunking West at the end of the first half, marked by a full company song, “Love Is Everywhere,” “joyfully transcends the kitsch with which it knowingly toys.” “This isn’t merely cheap stylistic promiscuity,” he argued, “but a disciplined and generous-hearted eclecticism. The company really understands what is at issue, morally and aesthetically, in the play.”
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