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| 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.
