“A sad tale’s best for winter: I have one of sprites and goblins. “ (Mamillius Act 2, 1).
Written around 1610, towards the end of Shakespeare’s life, The Winter’s Tale is one of a group of so-called romances, Pericles, Cymbeline, The Winter’s Tale and The Tempest. It is not a play with which I was at all familiar except for the famous “exit pursued by a bear” which I had wrongly associated with Autolycus and not, as every school boy knows, Antigonus. (The fact that they don’t......the schoolboys that is.....is a subject for a different blog....but I digress.)
So, I brought a mind and heart as free of prejudice as is possible in my case to the production by the all-male group Propellor at our local theatre last Friday night. They’re also touring with Henry V.
It was a great night in the theatre. The second part in particular explodes into a riot of music, farce magic, hilarious nudity, all of which was utterly Shakespearean in spirit and the handling of the coup de theatre at the end was wonderful in its dramatic handling. The audience, with a good percentage of school children, loved it. It is a crazy old play though. To say the plot is ramshackled is an understatement and if you’re looking for a neat unity of time place and space, this isn’t it. Time himself appears as a character to explain that we are moving on sixteen years at one point, a character is eaten by a bear on a wild coastal part of Bohemia, a baby is abandoned and miraculously found by a poor shepherd and then wooed years later by, fancy that, a prince who is the son of her father’s erstwhile best friend.....before they had a terrible falling out that is. Oh and yes, the dead are resurrected.
However, when you see it performed, with the vigour and enthusiasm provided by Propellor, these things don’t matter so much because you are borne along by the artifice of it all: your disbelief willingly suspended and, particularly in the scenes of farce, you get some feel of how Shakespearean audiences would have responded, laughed and jeered too. Reading it is a very different experience to seeing it performed, as it should be. Men playing women ought not to be a problem for a modern audience and indeed in the scenes of dance, music and comedy it really isn’t. But, the casting of the towering Vince Leigh as Paulina looming above the male retinue, her King Leontes (Robert Hands) and her husband Antigonus (Dugald Bruce-Lockhart) stretches our credulity. Paulina is a key character, delivering some crucial lines of warning and counsel to the insanely jealous Leontes. She presents his rejected baby daughter to him desperately trying to muster all her womanly resources but one is simply unable to see the character as female.
Nevertheless, there is so much to be admired. Tony Bell as Autolycus the scoundrel, now Fagin, now Gary Glitter, now Roxy Music, now Ian Dury is tremendous and there are some solid performances from Robert Hands and John Dougall as the Old Shepherd.
If you get a chance do go and see it. It’s on tour with Norwich, Plymouth and Hampstead all coming up. Who knows, it might even make the West End.
