The Winter’s Tale (Cheek by Jowl), Theatre Royal
I went into Shakespeare’s Winter’s Tale shamefully knowing very little of the story, and Cheek By Jowl’s performance was a treat.
For those uninitiated, The Winter’s Tale tells the story of King Leontes of Sicilia, who has grown suspicious that his good friend Polixenes, the King of Bohemia, has consorted with his pregnant wife, Hermione. The suspicion becomes a fear becomes a confident knowledge, rapidly driving the Sicilian king to a state of frenzy. Polixenes escapes to Bohemia, warned by his loyal comrade Camillo. Leontes publicly holds his wife guilty of infidelity, and declares that the carried child must be illegitimate. The child, when born, is cast away to a distant land. Here the drama really begins.
Cheek by Jowl’s interpretation of this romantic tragedy has many of the hallmarks of modern Shakespeare performances. The set design is minimalist, consisting of a large wooden crate with sides that can be folded up and down to reveal contents, and a set of smaller wooden crates that act as seats and podiums. Atmosphere comes primarily from the use of lighting and sound, with stabs of thunder and lightning punctuating the tension. The chronological setting is ambiguous, though the costumes are typically contemporary for a modern interpretation, and the original language of the script remains largely unaltered.
That being said, some unexpected light relief comes in the form of an acoustic guitar wielding singer, who appears periodically like a sort of ‘Jack the Lad’ sprite, and breaks the dark ambience with injections of humour projected directly at the audience. He is one minute hey nonny nonny singer, the next a parody of Jeremy Kyle or Jerry Springer in a red showbiz jacket, flinging a microphone around and questioning the players on their relationship difficulties. While the humour did well to break up what is ultimately a very dark tale, for me it went a tad far in places, feeling painfully like an off-season night at Butlins. Much of this humour was humour for the sake of humour, rather than placed to illuminate or augment Shakespeare’s own tale, which was disappointing.
More successful is the introduction of the shepherd community where a grown-up Perdita is courted by Polixenes’ son, Prince Florizel. In the modern aesthetic, this rural community are played as Irish, allowing for subtler humour than our musical friend could provide. This comes chiefly from the old shepherd who adopts the lost baby Perdita as his own — an elderly and decrepit man who speaks in almost indecipherable slurs — and his clownish son. Polixenes and Camillo’s arrival in the community, two noble gentlemen disguised at their own hand as roughians, brings more hilarity.
Cheek by Jowl’s rendition of The Winter’s Tale is — by all accounts — wonderful. The central performance of Orlando James as Leontes is among the finest and most natural I have seen, a truly exceptional player who commands the stage and the character with immense authority. Another stand-out performance worth mention is that of young Tom Cawte as Leontes’ beloved son Mamillius. The 18-year-old dazzles on the stage .The staging succeeds in creating a convincing ambience when needed, from the flashes of lightning and thunder, to the storm-beaten ship arriving to deliver the baby and her carrier at the shore. As is most important with any production of Shakespeare in 2017, Cheek by Jowl present an accessible telling of the play, which is easy to follow without any prior knowledge of the plot, and characters whose motivations and traits we can feel and identify with.
A++
