Stratford and the Shaw Festival I: Shakespeare

From left: André Sills as Polixenes, Sara Topham as Hermione, and Graham Abbey as Leontes with members of the company of The Winter's Tale. (Photo: David House.)

Shakespeare’s romance The Winter’s Tale is one of the three or four plays I cherish most, and the Canada’s Stratford Festival hits a high mark with Antoni Cimolino’s production at the Tom Patterson Theatre. Cimolino has announced that he will step down from the artistic directorship of the company after one more season, and his Winter’s Tale is so beautiful from start to finish that you can’t help thinking this is the show he would like to be remembered for. He’s staged it on a simple set that the designer, Douglas Paraschuk, has enriched, scene to scene, with lyrical details and Michael Walton has lit exquisitely. One of the most poignant examples is the famous final scene. Paulina (Yanna McIntosh) leads the King of Sicilia, Leontes (Graham Abbey), who has been reunited with his childhood friend Polixenes (André Sills), his former ambassador Camillo (Tom Rooney) and his long-lost daughter Perdita (Marissa Orjalo) into a secret room. There, she tells them all, she has had a sculptor create an astonishingly lifelike statue of Leontes’s queen Hermione (Sara Topham), supposedly dead these sixteen years while Leontes, under Paulina’s guidance, has done penance for the grievous wrongs he committed against her, Polixenes and Perdita (then just an infant). The stage is unilluminated except for three handheld lanterns, so the statue is revealed suddenly, the lantern light painting the darkness. When Paulina works her magic and Hermione moves, the effect is so subtle that at first you wonder if you really saw what you think you saw.

Sixteen years earlier, Leontes, in an apparent fit of madness, grew morbidly jealous of Hermione and their guest, Polixenes, the King of Bohemia, and jumped to the wild, unsupported conclusion that they were lovers and that Polixenes had fathered the child she was carrying (i.e., Perdita). He’d commanded Camillio to poison the visiting monarch, but instead Camillo fled with him, back to Bohemia, while Hermione was tried for adultery and treason and Leontes sent Paulina’s husband, Antigonus, to abandon the baby to be eaten by wild beasts on a far shore. Even the confirmation of her innocence by the oracle of Apollo, which Leontes had sent emissaries to consult, couldn’t convince him, so Apollo punished him by taking his son, Mamillius, from him – and Hermione as well, who appeared to die of a broken heart. Leontes’s jealousy is as extreme as Othello’s, but since, unlike the Moor’s, we don’t see what incites it, the premise sets up the mood and form of a fairy tale, surely the most sublime any playwright has ever devised.

Over the half-century since I saw my first Winter’s Tale, I’ve been lucky enough to catch some magnificent actors in the role of Leontes: the young Ian McKellen in a Royal Shakespeare production in Stratford, England; Brian Bedford in Stratford, Canada; Orlando James in the Cheek by Jowl revival; and Kenneth Branagh (with Judi Dench as a matchless Paulina). Graham Abbey, a marvelous Benedick at Stratford two seasons ago, isn’t an obvious choice for the part but he’s superb, and his approach isn’t like that of any of those predecessors. When Leontes loses his touch on reality and turns on his wife and his best friend in the “Too hot, too hot” soliloquy, it’s always horrifying (when McKellen played this transformation, it was terrifying). But when Abbey’s Leontes changes, we also pity him. We can’t believe that this man who just moments ago spoke so sweetly to Polixenes of his wife is now using nouns and adjectives to describe her that belong more properly to a despised whore, and because he doesn’t give the speech the sharp edge actors normally apply to it, we feel as someone else’s words are coming out of his mouth. When he completes the speech and turns to converse with Hermione and Polixenes, recalling his own happy childhood – of which Polixenes was an integral part – we can’t help thinking, He’s going to snap out of this; when he doesn’t, what we see is a man in despair. (It makes perfect sense that a few minutes later Camillo will characterize him as “in rebellion with himself.”) Abbey plays this altered king as truly a man seized by an affliction. He seems to be coming apart. When, after Hermione gives birth in prison and Paulina, sure that the sight of the baby will restore the king’s good sense, brings her to him and lays her in his arms, Abbey weeps, his head bent over the bundle, then pulls away and orders the destruction of the infant. Once again we see a man divided against himself.

Topham is charming in her early scenes, and she certainly gets Hermione’s compassion – when Leontes makes his odious accusation, her first thought is for him, for how miserable he will be when he realizes how wrong he is – and her untrammeled conviction and her dignity. I think the actress makes an error, however, when she cries in the trial scene, especially since we’ve already heard from her own lips that she isn’t susceptible to tears as other women are. McIntosh is a commanding Paulina, magnificent, even regal, in her fearlessness. Sills is a warm, immensely likable Polixenes, full of bonhomie; when the narrative moves to Bohemia in the fourth act and he unleashes his wrath against his son, Florizel (Austin Eckert), for courting a shepherdess – only we know she’s really the lost princess of Sicilia – he’s behaving at his worst, but Sills makes certain we don’t confuse this king’s rage with whatever fury has got hold of Leontes in the first half of the play. When we finally get to see Perdita at sixteen, Orjalo showcases her wit and playfulness. And as a bonus, the great Tom McCamus plays the Old Shepherd who, along with his son (Christo Graham), finds the babe and gives her a home and an upbringing.

The Winter’s Tale splits exactly in half. At the midpoint Antigonus (David Collins) is eaten by a bear offstage. (The well-known stage direction is “Exit, pursued by a bear,” though here we don’t see the bear; we only hear him.) Collins makes it clear that he’s drawing the beast away from the spot where he’s laid down the child, sacrificing himself for her; this is a lovely touch. And then the Old Shepherd wanders onstage and finds her, while his son describes the tempest that has torn Antigonus’s ship apart and the bear’s feast. Shakespeare’s text calls the Young Shepherd “Clown,” and his words are comical; they change the mood and tone of the play. “Thou met’st with things dying, I with things newborn,” his father comments, and when we return after intermission – this is always the spot where productions place the intermission – it’s springtime in Bohemia, and the local peasants are celebrating with a sheep shearing festival. This is the trickiest part of the play, and even directors who have rendered the Sicilia half, and the enchanting return to Sicilia in the fifth act, brilliantly tend to botch it by overplaying the comedy. Cimolino doesn’t make that mistake; in his hands the fourth act is lighthearted, not heavy-handed, and very entertaining. Even the scenes built around Autolycus (Geraint Wyn Davies) the thief who, as he himself expresses it, does good despite himself and helps to bring about the happy ending, are fun to watch, and man, is that rare.

Like Adrian Noble in the second Winter’s Tale I saw by the Royal Shakespeare Company, in 1992, Cimolino begins and ends the play with Mamillius (played alternately by Philip Myers and George Robinet). Time, a character Shakespeare didn’t introduce until the beginning of act four, played here by Lucy Peacock as an angel, leads the boy onstage and we hear, pulled out of context, the exchange from which the play derives its title, wherein he offers to tell his mother a story, declaring, “A sad tale’s best for winter.” (The scene is repeated a little later in context.) The difference between a Shakespearean romantic comedy like Twelfth Night or As You Like It and a romance like The Tempest or especially The Winter’s Tale is that at we know at the outset of a comedy that the villains who stand in the way of the lovers, even pose danger to them, will be defeated easily, leaving no remnant of unhappiness, whereas in a romance the ending is bittersweet because something has been irrevocably lost. Leontes and Hermione can never get back those sixteen years – and more powerfully, though they are reunited and Perdita is restored to them, Mamillius is gone forever. Cimolino reminds us by having Time come back with the boy at the end, when everyone has left the stage except Leontes, and Mamillius tosses an illuminated globe to his father before he vanishes again. The final scene of the play is as affecting as anything Shakespeare has given us – as affecting as Lear’s reunion with Cordelia or the moment when the fairy sprite Ariel teaches the human Prospero to be merciful. I started to weep even earlier, when Florizel arrived in the court of Sicilia and Leontes assured him, “Your mother was most true to wedlock, prince, / For she did print your royal father off, / Conceiving you”; the scene where Paulina displayed the baby Perdita to him and pointed out all the marks in her face that reflected her father’s image came flooding back to me. I wasn’t the only one crying in my section of the Tom Patterson Theatre when Hermione stepped forward and saw not only her reformed husband but the daughter she’d believed dead all these years. Cimolino’s appended finale reserves one last tear for his audience.

Tom Rooney and Tom McCamus in Macbeth. (Photo: David Hou.)

The director-designer Robert Lepage is touched with genius, and the opening of his Macbeth (at the Avon Theatre), which he’s conceived as a kind of movie on stage, is deeply cool. Behind a scrim, a pair of thugs in a rowboat chain the Thane of Cawdor to a chest and drop it into a lake, and we see him plunge down and down as the credits roll. When the play proper starts, Macbeth (Tom McCamus) and Banquo (Graham Abbey) enter on motorcycles, reflected on a sheet of mylar, and the Witches (Aidan DeSalaiz, Paul Dunn and Anthony Palermo in drag as cycle sluts) appear behind it. Lepage has other juicy visual ideas too. One scene is set in a pool hall. Macbeth’s castle has been turned into a motel somewhere out in an unvaried landscape which is the rendezvous spot for the motorcycle gang led by Duncan (David Collins). The motel is in sections that keep breaking apart and coming together, and the framed units suggest Macbeth’s isolation once he murders Duncan and takes over the gang, then becomes obsessed with killing everyone he suspects might pose a threat to him. Lepage keeps McCamus moving through the set during his soliloquies; it swallows him up. In the original the murderers Macbeth commissions to dispatch Banquo and his son Fleance (who gets away) descend upon them in the woods; here father and son go for a motorcycle ride and the murderers jump out at them from behind gas pumps at a service station, and they dispose of the body by setting the pumps on fire; they metamorphose into grills for the feast scene (a barbecue, natch). I’m sure there’s never been a production of this play in which the air-drawn dagger and Banquo’s ghost were so convincing or so creepy.

All of this ingenious embellishment skirts the central problem, however: if you make Macbeth about rival motorcycle gangs, it becomes emotionally weightless. If Duncan is just an outlaw biker who orders his minions to off a traitor, why should we care whether or not his son Malcolm (Austin Eckert) vanquishes the man who eliminated him and gets back his “throne”? (Lepage omits the younger prince, Donalbain; no great loss there. The only director I know of who has ever found something interesting to do with Donalbain is Roman Polanski in his 1971 film.) Shakespeare wrote Duncan as a virtuous king; in the best Macbeth I’ve ever seen, Trevor Nunn’s for the Royal Shakespeare Company starring Ian McKellen and Judi Dench, Duncan is saintly. The idea is that Macbeth, who admires his king and has fought nobly for him, becomes a monster when he stabs him to death, and every step he takes makes him more hideous. When he sends more murderers to slaughter everyone in Macduff’s castle, including his wife and young children, we understand that this man has truly embraced evil. Lepage leaves out the Macduff murders, which is, along with the blinding of Gloucester in King Lear, the most profoundly upsetting scene in Shakespeare.

Even in visual terms, Lepage keeps painting himself into a corner. Macbeth and Banquo’s encounter with the Witches looks terrific, but the scene that follows, where Duncan commends them on their loyalty and bravery, brings on more guys on motorcycles, and they take up so much of the stage below the mylar that there’s no room for anyone to move. So we get fifteen or twenty minutes of actors sitting on bikes. There’s far too much of that mylar mirror effect, and once you’ve figured out that the tiny neon dots are reflecting the exit signs in the Avon rather than part of the desolate highway landscape, they become a distraction. McCamus is a splendid Macbeth, but playing Lady M. as the wife of a biker who’s devoted to securing power for her husband doesn’t do much for Lucy Peacock, though her reading of the handwashing speech (set in a motel bathroom) is impressive. No one else makes much of an impression.

– Steve Vineberg is Distinguished Professor of the Arts and Humanities at College of the Holy Cross in Worcester, Massachusetts, where he teaches theatre and film. He also writes for The Threepenny Review, The Boston Phoenix and The Christian Century and is the author of three books: Method Actors: Three Generations of an American Acting Style; No Surprises, Please: Movies in the Reagan Decade; and High Comedy in American Movies.