The Winter's Tale (27 page)

7. The involved, promenading audience: the trial scene in Dominic Cooke's 2006 production in the Swan Theatre.

What is your view of what causes Leontes' sudden explosion of suspicion, and did that come about or develop during rehearsal?

Noble:
Shakespeare requires us to be almost unprepared for it—it's written that way. We see a tiny crack and then suddenly a fissure a thousand miles deep. It struck me that we had got to start from what is written, rather than easing our way in in a comfortable fashion. In other words, not work out in advance a whole series of neuroses that would eventually lead to that explosion. If there were a series of neuroses they have to be hidden from the audience. You start from the objective, i.e. the way the words are written on the page, so it has to be sudden, it has to be instantaneous, it has to be violent, it has to be Old Testament. Then John Nettles and I worked out a psychological pattern and a series of choreographic patterns on stage that would allow that to be expressed. Exactly what John thought you'd have to ask him; in a way that's not my business, that's his mystery. I did certain things like freezing the action; I used that method from the beginning of the play. There's a feeling about the beginning of the play whereby people are clinging on to joy, clinging on to memories, whether of the nine months they've all been having this marvelous time hanging out in Sicily or of their childhood—they're hanging on to something. I dramatized that by using a lot of freeze-frames, allowing Antigonus and Camillo to walk around and look at beautiful things frozen in
time, which allowed me dramatically to use the same device when Leontes starts to go. We froze on Polixenes and Hermione, so Leontes could get within literally inches and look into her eyes, examine in a scientific way how she positioned her hand, whether it was ambiguous, all of those things. If you look through Shakespeare's canon, I think the most violent emotion he explores is sexual jealousy. It's corrosive, it's lethal, it's obscene. Whether it's Othello, whether it's the father to the daughter in
Romeo and Juliet
, whether it's
The Winter's Tale
, it's an obscene, uncontrollable emotion. It's also completely irrational: the handkerchief?! The handkerchief is as absurd as the palm paddling in
The Winter's Tale
. They're tiny things but they are the matter upon which these catastrophes rest.

8. Court celebrations (with balloons) suspended in the freeze-frame moment of jealousy, Leontes isolated as Hermione paddles Polixenes' palm: Adrian Noble's 1992 production.

Gaines:
I came to rehearsal knowing it because I have felt it, been hit by it, as many people have—you turn a corner and see something you don't expect. The suddenness is completely realistic. Yes, Leontes goes further than most people: he goes mad, he is insane with jealousy. I went into rehearsal trusting Shakespeare—and in this play
and in this passage in particular, he gives the actor everything he needs in the punctuation alone, forcing us to a place of teetering, breath-knocked-out-of-you imbalance: “Inch-thick, knee-deep, o'er head and ears a forked one!— / Go, play, boy, play. Thy mother plays, and I / Play too.” Thoughts spill one into the other, with three mid-stop lines within one verse line. You can hardly take a breath, you can hardly think because this fit comes upon you as if you're struck by lightning. The thoughts are heaped one upon another—Shakespeare's writing at this moment is like a cyclone and it whirls you around. Meeting Leontes in rehearsal is like meeting that part of ourselves that we don't want to remember, that we hope never to meet again, but whom we
do
know. And there was no one in rehearsal who hadn't been there. It was overwhelming working that scene, overwhelming and ultimately thrilling—because it is life itself. There's no mask. When played well, there's no actor performing in it. It is life, it is shocking and cataclysmic, a terrifying journey into the abyss of the soul.

“I have
tremor cordis
on me: my heart dances, / But not for joy, not joy.” I don't in any way see this as a fairy-tale moment. Perhaps it happens because he is a king, because he has only himself to answer to. But more important than being a king is being a frightened man. Because there's also terror that lives in jealousy, the terror of being a cuckold, of the shame and the humiliation of it. Something inside Leontes, some dark place that's always been there, is triggered in that moment, [thinking] “When I lose love, there is no world for me to hold on to. If I lose the people I trust, then my life is a sham, my kingdom is a sham, my child must be a bastard.” I think that's the key: when he believes himself betrayed by the people closest to him, his first instinct is to destroy. None of us are that far away from being Leontes, at least in our imaginations.

Cooke:
I guess I wasn't really interested in the “why” but the “what.” It seems to me that the play is not really about why Leontes has become the way he has. It's about irrational behavior and the disastrous consequences of that behavior, especially in powerful people. So, for me, backstory was really only important inasmuch as it supported the actor in playing the present moment action. I'd read a
lot in preparation and we had a psychoanalyst come into rehearsal to talk about Leontes' jealousy—both jealousy of Polixenes taking his wife away but also a homoerotic jealousy; that in some ways his wife was taking his potential lover away. These notions are really interesting but I don't know how relevant they are. The cause of Leontes' breakdown is not fully explored by Shakespeare and in some ways, I believe, it is as random as the appearance of the bear in the play. These events have a spiritual logic—they bring about a journey that the characters need to go on. Their cause is almost divine, rather than rooted in a literal world.

How important for you was the pagan, classical setting—the consultation of the oracle, the thunderbolt that seems to come from Jupiter?

Noble:
I wouldn't say it was pagan. I would say that was part of the mystery of it. I would absolutely say it is sacred. It's numinous; it's the acceptance that there is mystery in our lives. If you have a faith then there is the possibility of some sort of invisible but ubiquitous force for good. It is interesting that Paulina says at the end, “It is required / You do awake your faith.” I've done the play twice and, actually, I've done it all over the world—the tour went all over England and then to Warsaw and Krakw; my other
Winter's Tale
went all over Europe, the Far East, and to New York and Washington—and I've seen this extraordinary thing happen every single night. The audience know that there's a trick to it, but they remain profoundly moved by the transformation of the statue. One could say that Christianity is a metaphor; the fallen man, the crucifixion of Christ, the twelve disciples. But metaphor works on the human imagination in a very particular way. That scene is a metaphor, and we know it's a metaphor, but it touches us in a very mysterious and
very
potent way. It almost never fails to work. Shakespeare has set us up in using means that are in a way purely man-made, but there are visions that are sacred and things that happen beyond the material. They are of the numinous variety. It's not just a pagan play, it's a secular play, and it has another dimension, a holy dimension.

Gaines:
There is a deep and abiding spirituality in this play but, no, the pagan, classical setting did not influence our production in any literal sense. These pagan gods certainly have more power than this king because, ultimately, it's in the spirit world that judges him, and Leontes loses sight of that. In rejecting the spirit world, his hubris must be tamed, he must be brought to his knees. His dear son dies, his queen dies, and his life is left in a pile of rubble. Consulting the oracle is a metaphor for making contact with our universal conscience. Spirituality for me exists beyond a single religion. I think these last plays dwell in this other realm. Spiritual guidance and influence run throughout them—here in
The Winter's Tale
, in
Pericles
, certainly in
Cymbeline
, and in
The Tempest.
These stories are elevated beyond the rules or the traditions of any single religion. They embody a reverence for life.

Cooke:
It's important in that the play is mythic. It's not a literal world. It's full of psychological and emotional truth but it is conscious of itself, like the other late Shakespeare plays, as a story. It's truthful but not literal. Its connection with the classical world is that the play is concerned with an idea of spiritual laws—that there are certain spiritual laws that, if broken, will be paid for. This seems to be a very Ancient Greek notion. What we did was create a world where a divine presence existed. This, for me, is in the play—when Apollo's judgment is disobeyed, disaster strikes. We accentuated this in the trial scene by using the sound of approaching thunder as Apollo's oracle was read out. So we respected the epic, classical gesture of the play without getting caught up in a kitsch world of men in skirts!

How did you stage the moment when Antigonus exits “pursued by a bear”?

Noble:
It seemed to me that it's one of those things you shouldn't duck as a director. I tried to make it as amazing, fabulous, and extraordinary as possible. I had a huge bear and staged it quite vividly. It seemed to be the thing to do. When we were on the road we had this huge sheet that the whole audience held and rippled, so they were literally
creating the stage upon which Antigonus was walking. They created this strange link with death. Then literally from among the audience we had the bear coming out. You can't short change things like that. It's like people who say there shouldn't be a good fight at the end of
Hamlet.
It's just a swizz for the audience!

Gaines:
The stage was very dimly lit, almost black. You hardly saw anything but what you
thought
you saw was terrifying. A huge, white polar bear, perhaps eight feet tall with a ferocious face and tremendous teeth, ran toward the audience on that deep thrust stage—a slathering, drooling beast coming straight at you as it ran up the center aisle. It was so quick and the sound so overpowering and the scream of Antigonus so terrifying, that all together in this brief moment, it was shocking. Then there was a quick blackout and we saw Antigonus' blood on the white carpet. We cared for him, and so that spot of blood was devastating.

Cooke:
We had a very scary, life-size bear and it came through the audience. We tried to make it as real as possible and not send it up. I think that all these late Shakespeare plays work best when you commit to the here and now of what is happening and make that as real and as truthful as you possibly can, not comment or send it up. As Shakespeare's career develops it seems to me he writes more from a place of the unconscious. There is a mythic, poetic, divine, spiritual logic to the late plays. They're not really naturalistic plays. I think it also comes from a lifetime of having worked in the theater and understanding what an audience will accept, and how far they will go imaginatively when a play has an emotional logic. The last scene of
Cymbeline
played truthfully is very powerful, yet on the page you think it's faintly ridiculous! I think that comes from a lifetime of being an actor and writer and understanding that if an event is truthful and real, and by that I don't mean naturalistic, an audience will accept it. It's almost as if the play conjures up a bear at this point and we delivered one that was as real as possible. We also made it clear that Antigonus lured the bear away from the child—almost offering himself as a sacrifice for having exiled and abandoned the child.

One of the distinctive features of the play is the sixteen-year gap between the end of Act 3 and the beginning of Act 4. What consequences did that have for your production?