Often dubbed a problem play, this near final work by Shakespeare certainly has a compendium feel about it. It’s a three hour sweep through a brutal tyranny based on a tragic jealousy, followed by tempests and bears, a bucolic pastoral fantasy with the rouseabout mirth of peasants, a sweet romance and then a fairy story ending of redemption.
From the start, Leontes of Sicily inexplicably believes in the adultery of the pregnant Hermione with his visiting childhood friend, Polixenes of Bohemia. His queen and young son die in grief, their new daughter is left to the wilds and his good councillor Camillo escapes to Bohemia.
Sixteen years later, and after heaps of festive country fun, we return to the repentant Leontes who is finally re-united with his lost daughter and magically revived queen. It’s been an overlong, wintry fairy tale but the ending is certainly moving.
John Bell’s production tells the story through the eyes and wizardry of the young dead prince, trying to orchestrate this restoration of his family. While Stephen Curtis’s fixed nursery set, cluttered with dress-ups, toys and toddler furniture, nicely suggests the infantilism of Leontes, it does cramp the action as well as the imaginative reach of the rest of the play.
A grieving boy dreaming this childish clutter of stories and characters profoundly resolves the play’s multiple modes, but somehow it begs for a larger canvas and a more vivid, less conventional interpretation. Young Otis Pavlovic, alternating with Rory Potter, is more of a side act on the bunk bed.
Bell’s production has rich moments in the nursery from performances such as Helen Thomson as the statuesque Hermione, Michelle Doake as her fearless advocate, Paulina, and Philip Dodd transforming Camillo into a pencil thin British bureaucrat. Terry Serio is a lively, acid-touched fraudster as Autolycus and Justin Smith endearing as his simple shepherd victim, although some of this pastoral romp could be cut.
Bell has a worthy goal to respect before all else the words of Shakespeare, yet not all his cast, especially in the royal scenes, have the power to deliver them consistently. It’s a relief to get to the final redemption but the journey is colourful and mostly engaging.
Rating: 3 out of 5 stars
The Winter’s Tale
Bell Shakespeare
Playhouse, Sydney Opera House, Bennelong Point
www.bellshakespeare.com.au
1 – 29 March
