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 The TheatreguideLondon Review

The Winter's Tale
The Roundhouse, Autumn 2002

The Royal Shakespeare Company's first production at the Roundhouse gets off to a rocky start, but develops into one of the most emotionally satisfying productions of this difficult play that I've ever seen. Those willing to sit through a lifeless first half-hour will find their patience well rewarded.

This is the one about the king who suddenly becomes convinced his wife is being unfaithful with the king next door. She dies, it seems, and their daughter is left to perish, but 16 years later the girl, miraculously saved, falls for the son of the neighbour king, leading eventually to multiple reconciliations, etc, etc.

For no particular reason, director Matthew Warchus has set the play in 1950s America, with Sicilia a sophisticated urban court and Bohemia an Ozark hillbilly community. This does absolutely nothing to illuminate or invigorate the play, but it's harmless enough, and there are a few hints that the setting has helped some actors toward their characterisations.

(It goes without saying that the American accents are all atrocious. As Leontes, Douglas Hodge seems to be striving for a neutral northern California sound, but keeps straying into a southern accent, while Rolf Saxon's supposedly Ozark Polixenes travels from Texas to Brooklyn and back in the course of a single sentence and Lauren Ward's Perdita is more deep Mississippi than Ozark. And some of the updating doesn't work either, like turning Antigonus from a gentleman of the court into a curiously uppity chauffeur.)

Like most actors playing Leontes, Douglas Hodge can make little sense of his sudden jealousy, though you might be too distracted by the really bad impersonation of John Malkovich he affects in the opening scene to notice. But once he gets going, the king's passion and torment become fully believable and deeply moving, so that we never forget that this misguided tyrant is harming himself at least as much as anyone else.

Anastasia Hille is a particularly wooden Hermoine in the opening scene, but she too gets much better, with her trial scene particularly powerful. (If the modern dress led her to being able to play the wrongly-accused queen with a mix of haggard fatalism and twentieth-century assertiveness, it justified itself right there.) Myra Lucretia Taylor, also adopting a modern characterisation, makes a strong Paulina.

The Bohemia scenes, involving the young lovers, illustrate what I think of as the Franco Zeffirelli law, inspired by his truly major discovery about Romeo and Juliet 40 years ago: if the actor and actress can convey youth, charm and a sense of really being in love, then they don't have to be able to read the lines especially well. Lauren Ward and Alan Turkington convey more just with their presence than with their acting - she in particular has some of the same fragile ingenue charm that the young Imogen Stubbs wowed us with at her RSC debut two decades ago.

The modern setting does get the production through one of Shakespeare's most awkward patches, the string of messengers reporting on offstage action near the end of the play, here cleverly and effectively condensed into a radio news report. The final act, with its magical reunions and reconciliations, will leave you misty-eyed, an altogether appropriate finale to what will have been an almost fully satisfying emotional journey.

Oh, and the bear (of "Exit, pursued by a..." fame) is the best I've ever seen.

Gerald Berkowitz

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Review - The Winter's Tale - RSC Roundhouse 2002