A ‘Winter’ For All Seasons
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Edward Hall has found the ideal way to reconcile the stylistic upheavals of “The Winter’s Tale” – by not even bothering to try. When William Shakespeare lurches from shadowy doom to sun-dappled ribaldry to tear-jerking reconciliation, Mr. Hall and his all-male theater company, Propeller, lurch right along with him. If an actor stands on trial for his character’s life in one scene and does a bawdy folk dance in pigtails a few scenes later, as Simon Scardifield does so effectively, so be it. Mr. Hall trusts his idiosyncratic vision and his versatile cast to put over each chunk so vibrantly that the audience either doesn’t realize or doesn’t care that it was watching a totally different play 20 minutes earlier. Indeed, only when he tries to join together the play’s disparate parts does the production falter.
Midway through the play, Time itself (Tam Williams) appears to explain a 16-year gap in time. “It is in my power / To o’erthrow law and in one self-born hour / To plant and o’erwhelm custom.” The London-based Mr. Hall – whose New York credits include two acclaimed Shakespeares, including the England-as-abattoir “Henry VI” distillation “Rose Rage,” and a discombobulated “Streetcar Named Desire” revival, all in the last two years – enjoys a similar impulse to subvert the usual laws of narrative. We go where Shakespeare wants us to go, and thanks to Mr. Hall’s keen directorial impulses, we enjoy nearly every strange stop along the way.
“The Winter’s Tale” may not typically get listed among Shakespeare’s “problem plays,” but it certainly is problematic. What starts as a gripping examination of sexual jealousy – the insecure King Leontes accuses his wife, Hermione, of infidelity, with disastrous consequences – veers deep into rustic buffoonery before tying up the two wildly divergent styles with an equally odd bout of mystical romance. Some directors hedge their bets by leavening the early drama and giving the pastoral silliness a moody foreboding. Not Mr. Hall: Leontes’s “ill-ta’en suspicion,” depicted with harrowing precision by Vince Leigh, is as chilling as the prancing rustics are ludicrous.
Getting from A to B can be rocky, though, and Mr. Hall relies too much on an awkward framing device, bridging several sequences by using Leontes and Hermione’s doomed older child, Mamillius, as a hovering presence. Mamillius glowers and seethes on the perimeter in that wordless, ubiquitous way that amounts to wearing a “Directorial Conceit” sign. In fact, Mr. Hall sinks his teeth into this notion with all the subtlety of the bear that pursues Antigonus in Shakespeare’s most famous stage direction. (People tend to forget that this direction, silly as it is, comes just after Antigonus has left the infant Perdita to die in the wild and just before said bear eats him; I’ve always preferred the later “Here a dance of twelve satyrs.”)
The overreliance on the mute boy is a rare example of Mr. Hall letting his concept dictate the action instead of the other way around, and this contributes to the occasional leaden shift between the play’s various moods. That said, Mr. Williams convincingly converts from Mamillius to the grown-up Perdita, and Mr. Hall’s resonant final image of Leontes and his son reminds us just how complicated the “happy ending” is.
“The Winter’s Tale” swaps gender far less than “As You Like It,” which Declan Donnellan’s Cheek by Jowl company memorably brought to BAM in an all-male production a few years ago. (When it comes to Shakespeare, Propeller has apparently replaced Cheek by Jowl as the inventive, streamlined London import of choice.) The occasional milkmaid has a bit of chest hair visible under her midriff, but the casting is handled with a minimum of self-consciousness. The one exception comes from the explosive Adam Levy, who gives Hermione’s faithful and cantankerous companion Paulina (“I say good queen; / And would by combat make her good, so were I / A man”) a blustery physicality that threatens to overwhelm some of the early confrontations.
Mr. Levy has also contributed a series of impressive dance sequences. (No 12 satyrs, alas.) Propeller’s home base is the U.K.’s Watermill Theatre, which also originated the “Sweeney Todd” revival that opened last night on Broadway (see page 16), and it has some of the same do-it-yourself proficiency. The two small casts – “The Winter’s Tale” has a dozen actors, two more than “Sweeney” – change characters and responsibilities with impressive speed, and some of the actors take a spin with musical instruments here as well. In addition to playing Hermione with forceful grace and dancing that folk jig, Mr. Scardifield has a turn on the trombone. Take that, Patti Lupone.
The acting is strong overall but not without its weak links. Matt Flynn’s Polixenes is a bit of a bore, and while Bob Barrett and Bill Buckhurst are quite good as Leontes’s reluctant hatchet men, Mr. Buckhurst fails to find the brash poetry in Perdita’s suitor, Prince Florizel. But James Tucker and especially Jason Baughan (as the thieving Autolycus, the “snapper-up of unconsidered trifles”) achieve the miraculous: They make Shakespeare’s low-comedy scenes genuinely funny. These sequences benefit from the show’s infectious glut of folk-tinged songs, courtesy of four talented composers.
Any “Winter’s Tale” must be judged to some degree on its credulity-straining final scene, in which the much-abused Hermione reappears after 16 years – in the form of a statue come to life, thank you – and reunites with the man who sentenced both her and their child to death. Mr. Hall’s staging is just about perfect, an elegant blend of complicated emotions (Mr. Scardifield’s stony gaze makes it clear that Leontes still has some atoning to do) and arresting visuals. Ben Ormerod’s lighting here and throughout lends the action a shimmering lucidity, one of the few linchpins in Mr. Hall’s robust, casually chaotic, embracing vision.
Until November 6 (651 Fulton Street, Brooklyn, 718-636-4100).