Authors: William Shakespeare
Cymbeline (28 page)
While audiences and many critics appreciated the production’s irreverence, energy, humor, and sheer zest, some missed the play’s finer lyrical and emotional moments. Many felt that it failed to respond to the play’s dreamlike quality and that the actors were not vocally equipped for the openhearted, high-flying lyricism which should surprise and delight us at times. They were “cruelly exposed and emotionally underpowered,”
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wrote Dominic Cavendish, and Benedict Nightingale, “Sher’s approach doesn’t call for finesse and doesn’t get it.”
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For Paul Taylor, however, there was “a delightful blend of robust jokiness and dreamy delicacy.”
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3.
Bartlett Sher production, Theatre for a New Audience, The Other Place, 2001. Cloten (Andrew Weems) with prop horse.
2003—redemption through suffering
At the Swan, Dominic Cooke gave the audience a version of the play which was bound together by the characters’ emotional truth. Michael Billington, commenting first on the impossibility of finding a realistic setting for the play, said of this production, “Cooke gives us an alternative
Magic Flute
-style universe in which pain and suffering lead to understanding.”
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Emma Fielding as Innogen, Daniel Evans as Posthumus, and Anton Lesser as a wicked but anguished Iachimo all used the intimacy of the Swan stage to draw the audience into their emotional worlds. The production played extravagantly, lifting an ironic eyebrow at the plot’s wilder excesses, while relishing them at the same time.
2006—a fairy-tale world
In 2006, for the Complete Works Festival, the RSC commissioned the small Cornwall-based Kneehigh company to perform their version of the play. Kneehigh is known for its radical updating of classic stories and for its use of music and physical theater. As adapted and directed by Emma Rice (who also played the Queen), the play lost most of the original language, which was replaced with consciously banal soap opera speech. Susanna Clapp commented, “It squeaks into the RSC’s year of Complete Works not as a performance of a written play but as a response to it.”
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While following the plot’s twists and turns, it offered “a pared-down, revved-up look at fractured families and forbidden love.”
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Emma Rice, writing in the program, said:
But for me
Cymbeline
is a fairytale. It is about where we come from, who we are and how we find our way home. It is about family, but not a sentimental notion of family, no. This story tackles stepfamilies and dead parents, abduction and surrogate care. This is about families as we know them, damaged, secretive, surprising and frustrating.
She went on to say, “I want this production to celebrate the child in all of us” (this was signaled in the program by photos of the actors as children). The production ended with Innogen, Posthumus, and Cymbeline’s sons climbing into single beds to be read a bedtime story.
Like the 2001 production, this one polarized critics and audiences. Some welcomed it wholeheartedly: “Kneehigh has laid hands on [the play’s] unruly heart”;
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“a jubilantly free-wheeling rewrite”;
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“
Cymbeline
is a mad play and Kneehigh is a mad company. Plainly they were made for one another … [they] revel in the blackly comic clash of tones and anarchic knowingness.”
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Others felt that the losses from the rewriting were too great. Michael Billington found it “coarsely reductive,” disliked its “relentless jokiness,” and felt that “Rice substitutes sentimentality for real sentiment”;
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Fiona Mountford argued that “the humour sits uneasily with the strong surges of emotion and the real anguish of the separated lovers”;
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Sam Marlowe concluded that “While the production has
abundant appeal, it lacks emotional weight.”
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Both Susannah Clapp of the
Observer
and Michael Billington of the
Guardian
found the abandoning of Shakespeare’s language a step too far: “ ‘Fear no more the heat of the sun’, the only Shakespeare passage of any length that is retained, makes you feel that the decision to slip away from Shakespeare’s verse was misguided”;
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“It ducks the real challenge of making Shakespeare live through his language.”
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The Design Challenge
For a designer, the play is wide open. The very contradictions which make it seem impossible on the page offer endless design possibilities.
1962—a white box
For Gaskill’s Brechtian production, René Allio designed a white-carpeted stage, with the back wall and wings draped with white netting. Onto this, stagehands brought symbolic pieces of scenery, while the actors were very simply dressed with only a minimum of indicative elements, such as cloaks, headdresses, beards, and wigs. When the characters reached Wales, a cluster of rocks on a swivel was introduced, which could be angled as cave, camp, or battlefield.
1974 and 1987—fairy-tale country
For John Barton’s production, with its introduction of a storyteller, designers John Napier, Martyn Bainbridge, and Sue Jenkinson designed “a Britain which has all the appearance of a Hans Andersen fairytale and costumes that would not have disgraced Titania’s glade.”
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As in the 1962 production, the set was, in fact, very simple—a sloping, carpeted stage onto which emblematic images were introduced. As in 1962, rocks were brought on for the Wales scenes, but Billington complained that Milford Haven “looked to me like an
avant garde
sculpture exhibition at the Hayward Gallery.”
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The costumes, too, were simple and emblematic: Sebastian Shaw’s “almost unreachably senile”
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Cymbeline carried the symbol of his entrapment by the Queen in the form of a cloak that was “like a gilded cobweb.”
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In 1987, at The Other Place, the action was played on a bare arena stage, but one bathed in warm light to create a place at once
homely and magical. Harriet Walter describes how the actors were given a range of costumes from stock to choose from.
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(This unusual approach to costume design was also adopted in the 2003 production—a sign of the anarchic power wielded by this play.) The result was largely a mix of Jacobean jerkins with medieval robes, enhancing the nostalgic Englishness of the production.
1979—“not so much of no time as of every time”
Christopher Morley’s costume designs supported the anarchic quality of David Jones’ production. Where earlier designers had gone for a timeless quality to match the play’s shifting time zones, Morley designed a kaleidoscope, ranging from a trailing robe for Cymbeline to Roman soldiers in something very like SS uniforms. The stage, as in previous productions, was bare until the introduction of “a couple of crags like giants’ teeth”
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when the action moved to Wales. Symbolic backdrops indicated Britain with a golden sun against a dark portcullis and Rome with fascistic black and silver.
1997—the Japanese influence
For Adrian Noble’s production, Anthony Ward designed a kabuki-style staging: the forestage at the RST was extended into the auditorium and entrances were made along walkways running from the stalls. The stage was a cerulean blue cube with a vast white cloth that could act as groundsheet, backdrop, or canopy. The actors wore high ponytails and stiffly pleated robes. The effect was one of “economy and grace.”
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2003—Britons as barbarians
At the Swan, Rae Smith designed a production in which the costumes were eclectic and symbolic. Not everyone was happy with them: Rhoda Koenig, in the
Independent
, complained that the design “piled artifice upon confusion”
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and the
Sunday Times
reviewer remarked that it was “as if Stella McCartney had tried to do a send-up of Vivienne Westwood and made a hash of it.”
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Although there was an overall design concept, the actors (as in the 1987 production) were given some choice in their costumes: during rehearsals, racks of costumes from stock were brought in for the actors to try out, and the costumes became symbolic of character. So, for example, Emma Fielding, as Innogen the rebel princess, wore a silky golden gown with heavy, scuffed walking boots (Fielding has said that she remembered, as a teenager, annoying her mother by accessorizing the pretty dresses she bought her with Doc Martens boots);
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Iachimo and the other Italians wore designer suits, ironically in pure white; the Britons all wore feathers; the more feathers, the higher their rank, so Cymbeline himself was elaborately feathered and the Queen wore a trailing cloak of peacock feathers, “a frightening and appropriately unlucky garment.”
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The feathers gave the Britons a barbaric air which was heightened by their stamping, chanting rituals. The audience was invited to see them as the Romans saw them—an uncivilized people ripe for colonization.
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Adrian Noble’s production, 1997. Image highlights the Japanese-influenced, kabuki-style staging. Photo shows Iachimo (Paul Freeman, right) making a wager with Posthumus (Damian Lewis) about Innogen’s virtue while the Spaniard (Rex Obano), Philario (David Glover), the Dutchman (Vincent Leigh), and the Frenchman (Rod Arthur) look on, Act 1 Scene 4.
2006—an urban wasteland
For Kneehigh’s production at the Swan, Michael Vale designed a stark, cagelike design, with clanging doors and an enclosed stage
area above, which housed the band, and on which some interior scenes were played. At the opening of the play, hooded figures appeared in the half-light, fixing flowers, teddy bears, and messages to the cage bars—tokens of remembrance, we realized, for the little lost princes, kidnapped years before, establishing the brooding sense of loss which hovered over this production.
Innogen’s Journey
The role of Innogen lies at the heart of the play. It is with her separation, rejection, betrayal, loss, danger, recovery, and restoration that the audience must engage. Harriet Walter, who played the role in the 1987 production, says of her:
Imogen is a coveted role. It is her range that chiefly appeals. In one evening an actress can play a bit of Desdemona, Juliet, Cordelia, Lady Anne, Rosalind, Cleopatra. In reading up about Imogen, I came across many descriptive adjectives: “divine,” “enchanting,” “virtuous” … To play a heroine one must look for her faults, her human weaknesses. If a flawed and vulnerable person is seen to be tested, to learn, to change, to make brave choices and to overcome the odds, this puts heroic achievement within our reach and gives us hope for humankind.
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The most successful Innogens have found the character’s flaws as well as her heroism.
1962—golden girl
The young Vanessa Redgrave, fresh from a triumphant run as Rosalind in
As You Like It
, played Innogen and sent the (male) critics into poetic flourishes. Her performance was not universally admired: Charles Graves of the
Scotsman
felt that she was affected by playing Katherine in
The Taming of the Shrew
in the same season, and the reviewer in
The Stage
wrote, “I do not care greatly for Vanessa Redgrave’s Imogen. The gentle, tender, womanly yet firm-willed young wife demands greater maturity than she seems yet to possess … There is a touch of schoolgirlishness in her intensities and her agonies
leave one unmoved.”
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These critics were, however, very much in the minority; the majority reached for golden images: “delightful, glowing, tender and despairing, crazed, angry and joyous by turns, every mood convincing”;
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“Miss Redgrave’s flaxen beauty”;
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“She gave Imogen such a heartfelt honesty and beauty that I swear that every man in the audience must have felt the urge to jump onto the stage to her rescue”;
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“Miss Redgrave, in aspect and tone, will be the Imogen-Fidele of her generation—the season’s daffodil”;
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“Vanessa Redgrave’s Imogen has a golden lustre”;
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“Vanessa Redgrave strode through the nightmare wonderland like a noble-voiced goddess”;
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“Her ardour, here in full billow, is now a ready gift for parodists, but as she ranges the peaks of love, joy, shock and anguish, the spectator is shaken into a recognition of true beauty and greatness.”
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