The Winter's Tale (26 page)

However, two interesting new touches occurred in Act 5: in the first, Perdita fainted when Leontes turned against the lovers, a faint that brought back memories of Hermione and triggered both interest and remorse; in the second, after the reconciliation, Leontes noticed Hermione looking toward rather than, as usual, away from Polixenes—his “What? Look upon my brother” became a (possibly mock) reversion to jealousy before he laughed and begged their pardons.

Dominic Cooke's promenade production in the Swan opened at a New Year's Eve party, cast and audience joining hands together to sing “Auld Lang Syne” below a crazily-angled clock. Time was a dominant motif, interpreted here as both narrator and gardener, visible at his tasks throughout the play, tending both land and tale, and underlining, too, the cyclical, seasonal nature of the story.

Designer Mike Britton's transformation of the Swan looked
impressive and was very effective. The mix of promenaders in the stalls and seated audience elsewhere worked successfully, with acting areas at both stalls and gallery levels integrating and involving the whole theater, and the level of audience participation was carefully judged. Much use was made of two mobile rostra, as in Noble's 1984 tour. This was an intelligent, clear, and uncontroversial production, whose intimate scale and unusual staging provided its main innovations and offer an exciting point of departure for the future.

Shakespeare's most famous stage direction has been interpreted both naturalistically and symbolically. In Barton's ritualistic Lapland, an elderly shaman with a bear mask conducted Antigonus out; in 1986 the giant white bearskin covering the stage reared up and engulfed him; in 1999 the silk clouds that had loomed over Leontes' palace took bear form and swallowed him up. Impressive though these theater-high manifestations were, the stylized solutions generated mixed responses, while the naturalistic bears of 1981, 1992, 2002, and 2006 were found both convincing and genuinely frightening. In many cases Antigonus deliberately sacrifices himself to protect the baby; occasionally a ghostly Hermione appears to protect her daughter. Often (most notably in 1976 and 1986) the bear motif is used to unify the play, reappearing in various guises throughout.

Shakespeare's source was subtitled
The Triumph of Time
and directors have repeatedly used the concept to unify the play, emphasizing Time's role as “Shakespeare's ultimate protagonist.”
⁹⁰
Time opened Nunn's production as voice-over, and Eyre's as a stage-high masque character, while Cooke's production started with the chimes of midnight and unfolded beneath a giant carriage clock, as well as featuring Time the gardener as a constant onstage presence. Both Noble (1984) and Doran used a “quietly ticking clock” in the background.
⁹¹

In 1986, Time was a jolly old man with a Warwickshire accent, hovering on large feathered wings; in 1999 he was a numinous figure with the fallen sky draped around his shoulders; in 1976 he
was both bear and shaman. Often Leontes has done penance during his speech, or Perdita and Florizel met under his gaze. Just occasionally he has been displaced: in Noble's 1992 production his speech arrived “by balloon-post” to be read out “by a puzzled Camillo, casting bemused looks heavenwards,”
⁹²
while in 2002 Warchus cut the speech altogether—instead, the Shepherd and his son ended their jig of joy holding up the baby between them and a full-grown Perdita danced on, unraveling the “baby” which became her train, only stopping as Florizel launched a (real) hawk across the theater, the lights coming down as their eyes met.

Autolycus has been barely mentioned here, despite the attention-grabbing bravura of his role. Vital though he is to the performance and successful as his various interpreters have been, his key characteristics and even stage business have remained remarkably constant throughout the period, implicit in the script's very strong blueprint here.

Every director has found symbolic ways of unifying the play; often these have been provided by the very aspects that seemed most problematic to early generations, such as the bear and Time. Doubling, costume echoes, reiterated technical effects, recurrent design motifs such as Noble's balloons, repeated blocking such as the 2006 fainting, even the clear progression of the seasons have all made the play a satisfying and coherent whole, moving from the “sad tale” of the opening acts to an ending “full of grace and forgiveness.”
⁹³

Adrian Noble
, born in 1950, arrived at the RSC from the Bristol Old Vic, where he had directed several future stars in productions of classic plays. His
Henry V
on the main stage of the Royal Shakespeare Theatre in Stratford sowed the seed for Kenneth Branagh's film. Among his other major productions during his two decades at the RSC were
Hamlet
, again with Branagh in the title role;
The Plantagenets
, based on the
Henry VI/Richard III
tetralogy, and the two parts
of
Henry IV
, with Robert Stephens as Falstaff. Stephens returned in 1993 to play Lear in Noble's second production of the tragedy for the company. Noble's 1994
Midsummer Night's Dream
was made into a film. He was Artistic Director from 1991 to 2003, since when he has been a freelance director. His production style is characterized by strong use of colors and objects (such as umbrellas and balloons), and fluid scenic structure. He talks here about his 1984 small-scale touring production and, in more detail, his 1992 main stage production of
The Winter's Tale
, with John Nettles as Leontes and Samantha Bond as Hermione.

Barbara Gaines
grew up outside New York City. She fell in love with Shakespeare's sonnets as a youngster and gained her first dramatic experience working for her father, a film director, during summer breaks. She graduated from Northwestern University in 1968 and had a successful career as an actress in New York and theater educator in Chicago. In 1986, she founded her Shakespeare Repertory Theater, later renamed the Chicago Shakespeare Theater. From modest beginnings it has grown to become one of the largest producing theaters in Chicago. Gaines has directed many of the plays herself, often having particular successes with less frequently performed works, such as
Antony and Cleopatra
and
Troilus and Cressida
. Here she talks about her 2003 production of
The Winter's Tale
.

Dominic Cooke
, born in 1966, was educated at the University of Warwick. As an Associate Director at the RSC he undertook a number of highly successful productions, notably in the genres of comedy and romance. They combined theatrical energy with lucidity of storytelling. He also developed new theater writing for the company and directed an acclaimed production of Arthur Miller's
The Crucible
, shortly after the dramatist's death. In 2007 he became Artistic Director of the Royal Court, the British theater's leading house for contemporary drama. He talks here about his “promenade” production of
The Winter's Tale
, performed in the Swan during the RSC's Complete Works Festival of 2006–07.

How did you and your designer set about creating the distinctive worlds of Sicilia and Bohemia? The contrast between them is very important, isn't it?

Noble:
I've done the play twice and didn't create contrasting worlds for either production. The first occasion was for a tour, mostly of cathedrals. It was the first promenade production [in which the audience are standing and become involved in the scenes] ever done by the RSC and its provenance is quite relevant. Back in the eighties I'd been to Lincoln to see John Caird's touring production of
Romeo and Juliet
. I missed the train on the way back so I went to visit Lincoln Cathedral. It struck me smack between the eyes that this was where we should be playing. It was at the center of the community, and so it was both a sacred and a profane space. For the first time I wanted to do the tour! The space was crucial because I could see in it the possibility of doing something that was both sacred—i.e. that told the underlying story of
The Winter's
Tale
very clearly—but also profane, in the sense that it could reveal all of the wonderful contradictions of the human flesh in a marvelous way, and all very close up in a promenade production. The sacred aspect is as follows. It strikes me that underpinning the play is a very traditional medieval morality story: of the Fall, of somebody almost unknowingly falling from grace, then repentance and finally redemption. A very simple story, but one of the most important stories one could ever possibly tell about human beings, because we are all seriously flawed. I took that experience forward when I did the play with John Nettles in 1992. Anthony Ward designed it and as I said to him, it's not two worlds. It happens in one world. It's one story. To create totally different scenery for one and the other is just rubbish. We used the same scenery for both. We didn't use much but it was very beautiful. There was a box which created an inner world and an outer world, which seemed to me to be a very useful tool for this play.

Gaines:
Creating a sense of place and, yes, contrast, is essential in staging this story. I wanted to feel an icy chill in Sicilia and, by contrast, a warmth within Bohemia. One of my first visual inspirations was a Russian doll box, those brilliantly painted wooden dolls that fit one inside of another. The story of
The Winter's Tale
is multiple stories, one fitting inside another, inside another, compacted by the collapsing of time.

It was winter in that chilly court of jealousy, all in tones of black,
white, and grays—and it was snowing. (In Chicago, every dog owner who walks along the lakefront has a visceral knowledge of that crystal clear, midwinter cold!) In Bohemia, I saw a Russian peasant-inspired world, soaked in warmth and unabashed color. I imagined these two polar worlds both set against a black, reflective surface. A simple back wall and floor of reflective black seemed to push the essential emotional elements of Sicilia and Bohemia to their extremes. The reflectivity of a nonliteral, nonspecific set felt right because this play for me is a reflection of life and all its changes and colors and reverberations. Those mirror images reflected upon the set suggested the repetition of time—within the wide borders of this play, and within all of our lives and our stories. Our search for love and the vortex of jealousy are universal: human life on this planet has existed tens of thousands of years—as have love and jealousy. Boxes within boxes within boxes—the ripple of time passing through all of our stories.

The contrast between those two places symbolizes interiorly the antithesis within all of us, our lighter and darker elements. As life goes on, we face that darkness, and search for more light
: that
is the search within this play. Shakespeare understood that years, and lifetimes, are encompassed by it. The play emerges emotionally from the recesses of the dark sides of our souls, where our fears, jealousies, and self-doubts dwell. Like Leontes, we are afraid. We're afraid to till that interior landscape, yet we must: crises force us to. Life, with its wheel of fortune, also gives us Bohemia—a landscape of light, warmth, companionship, community, love, and color. Then in Act 5 we find ourselves in yet another place of human existence—a place of the spirit and of transcendence.

Cooke:
We started with two key principles. The first was to do with time periods. It seemed to me to be very important to get the audience to have a direct and emotional response to the sixteen years' passage of time in the play, and the change that symbolizes. We thought about what period in our living memory had seen the most significant change, particularly in terms of the relationship between generations. We came up with the idea that if we started the play in the mid-fifties, with that kind of post–Cold War McCarthyist paranoia
and formality, then in Act 4 you would get this extraordinary transformation to the world of the late sixties: Woodstock, hippies, and flower power. The late sixties would resonate with the pastoral imagery in that part of the play and also the feeling of a melting of barriers and boundaries, a move toward a more informal world. It gave Autolycus the feel of roving hippie and crook, a beatnik outsider, and it allowed an atmosphere at the sheep-shearing of a new generation coming through who were freer and more ready to follow their instinct. That connected with another theme of the play, the danger to the state of Florizel, a young person in a position of political power, following his instinct. These two eras just seemed emotionally right. We didn't labor the point or make a massive issue out of the differences between the two periods, it was mainly done with costume; more of a reference to the period rather than a literal setting.

The second principle was to perform the play promenade, which meant that the audience were on their feet and actually physically involved in the scenes. This idea came from noticing that the structure of the play is built around communal events: the trial scene, the
sheep-shearing, and the unveiling of the statue. These were events that the audience could be directly involved in. We also turned the opening scenes into another communal event, a New Year's Eve party. This again referred to the idea of time passing; the cyclicality of time, the idea that, like the country, the court has its seasonal rituals. As the play progressed we moved from midwinter through spring into summer and ended back in winter. The way we staged the play was that the audience were part of these communal events but there were other scenes that they were watching from outside. You were both implicated as an active witness in the communal events, and then watching the consequences of those events and choices being played out privately in rooms around the palace. We played those two dynamics.