The Winter’s Tale – RSC 2021

Royal Shakespeare Company
Royal Shakespeare Theatre
From Stratford-upon-Avon

BBC4 25 April 2021
On BBC iPlayer

Directed by Erica Whyman
Set Designer Tom Piper
Costume Designer Madeleine Girling
Music Isobel Waller-Bridge

CAST
Joseph Kloska – Leontes
Kemi-Bo Jacobs – Hermione
Andrew French- Polixines
Amanda Hadingue- Paulina
Colm Gormley- Antigonus
Ihsan Ahmed – Mamillius
Dyfrifg Morris- Mariner
Anne Odeke – Autolycus
Georgia Landers -Perdita
Assad Zaman – Florizel
Zoe Lambert – Sheperdhess
William Grint- Young Shepherd
Alfred Clay- Archidamus
Avita Jay- Cleomines
Bea Webster- Emilia
Mogali Masuku- Dion
Baker Mukasa – Lord
Vicky Hall- Mopsa

The Winter’s Tale may have been written during the plague lockdown of 1609, according to director, Erika Whyman. It was near the end of rehearsals and ready to go at the first lockdown of 2020. We had tickets for the 11th April 2020, Easter Saturday, right after it was due to start. So here we are just over a year later. The RSC re-assembled the cast of early 2020, and filmed it over three days in 2021. They observed social distancing and face masks until the last few days before filming. This shows throughout in the blocking.

Unlike the National Theatre film of Romeo & Juliet, the RSC have gone for filming it as a theatre play on the great stage of the theatre in Stratford. We are so used to being there that a wave of regret for missed productions hit us right at the start. It was good to be back in such a favourite place, if only digitally.

That dispelled pretty quickly as it went on though. As I point out in every review it is the most problematic of problem plays. The first half is tragedy with nary a smile. The second is bucolic high jinks, then thirdly Shakespeare invented the Agatha Christie ending, where just one character explains the plot at high speed as a report. It was as if Shakespeare couldn’t be bothered to write the last couple of scenes.

They were right to stick with the RSC feel and film a theatrical performance, but you’re still not actually there. It’s why the England football manager has to actually sit and watch Premier League matches live, and not on TV. When you film, someone has selected what you’re looking at and a lot will be close up. So you don’t see the movement off the ball. You don’t see the whole picture. Also, the acting style is very different. It’s why audiobook producers prefer radio actors above TV actors and TV actors over theatre actors.

The concept was good. They picked up on the 16 year time gap between the Sicilia scenes and the Bohemia scenes, and set Sicilia as 1953 (at least in their minds), the year of the Coronation. Then Bohemia becomes 1969. They mention ‘the year of the Moon landing’ but there’s not the slightest visual reference to either the Coronation nor the Moon landing.

1953 meant Hermione got a spectacular frock and the blokes just dull stuff of no fixed period. 1969? My era. They got it almost entirely wrong. Florizel had drainpipe pale blue jeans, instead of flares. Perdita got a frumpy early 70s frock. Only Autolycus looked hippy. They gave her a dirty old Vespa scooter to push about. They must have removed the engine. As Vespas had the engine on one side, they were a swine to push. Also while the Vespa is old and dirty, the Vespa as a symbol is ‘All things Italian’ in the late 50s and early 60s, then Mods (versus Rockers) in the mid-60s. Nothing about a Vespa reads ‘1969’ to me. I had a Vespa. I had a parka. I had lots of extra lights. 1964 to 1965.

Leontes (Joseph Kloska) accuses Hermione (Kemi-Bo Jacobs)

Joseph Kloska’s Leontes was in flat-out jealousy mode from square one. No build up. No mounting suspicion. It was instantly over the top. I liked Kemi-Bo Jacobs Hermione, and Amanda Hadingue’s Paulina, but with so much rage in the middle, it all became overwrought. Both women were powerful.

One device was having a cameraman on stage filming Hermione’s trial with cuts to black and white view in 4:3 old style television aspect. Interesting.

Later they did it in Bohemia with a degraded signal to 4:3 screen so as to look like (say) Super-8 or 16 mm film, or early colour TV. That didn’t make much sense.

That favourite ‘Exit pursued by a bear’ was done by having the whole cast appearing in the background groaning and moaning a simulated … what? Shipwreck?

Then they blew it. The rustic bit looked dull (because of the social distancing).

Anne Odeke as Autolycus. The cake was less elaborate on film than on photo

Autolycus was very good (Anne Odeke). I didn’t mind her added line (to the camera in 4:3) about Shakespeare having written King Lear during a pandemic lockdown, though other reviewers disliked it. I don’t see why, as Autolycus works far better if they are allowed to improvise lines, as I guarantee a Shakespearean clown would have done in the 1600s in any play, which is why the surviving texts often have a very specific reference to something current which now seems totally obscure. I’d have given her a freer hand. Ah, I thought … THAT’s where you get the Moon reference in. My instant thought is Gil Scott-Heron’s poem:

A rat done bit my sister Nell
And Whitey’s on the moon.

Go on! Do it!

Drapes and curtains and falling bits of cloth were all good- this seems an RSC given nowadays. Though dealing with a narrow piece of cloth can look like struggling with a giant toilet roll. In the early part of the play up to the trial scene, there was a large bulging, billowing piece of cloth suspended over the stage. Karen thought it looked like a giant tongue (it was lit in pink at the start). She then noted how often the word tongue appears … not that she counted, but I can confirm it’s nine times in Acts i and II (Searching is dead easy nowadays!)

Paulina reveals the statue as Perdita watches. Does it look 1969 to you?

The music was good- the rock band material sounded interesting, though the play-out rock song over the credits came from nowhere. That reported ending is always a chore, but I thought the statue scene worked particularly well here. Hermione and Paulina do need to look bemused and dubious at the resolution and they do.

Saving the best for the end: Joseph Kloska as Leontes, Kemi-Bo Jacobs as Hermione

Look over the photos … a lot was “Wanamaker Playhouse dark”. I would have thrown way more light and colour into Bohemia.

There are three over-riding Woke problems at the RSC. Everyone applauds their vow to bring a disabled (sorry, “challenged”) actor into each show. We’ve had wheelchairs, withered arms and sometimes a deaf person using sign language in a minor role. OK, the deaf truly are invisible. Our older son had a year of near deafness before an operation. But, and I’ve beaten this drum before, and I will again … Shakespeare is about language as well as plot. They have two deaf actors. Emilia can actually vocalise clearly enough to understand. Fine, I’d have left that there as the obligatory disability. But then they cast an actor who cannot vocalise intelligibly as the Sheperd(ess)’s son. That throws all those comedy scenes entirely. They resort to repetition and sub-titles. Fine, good physical acting. But THIS IS F*CKING SHAKESPEARE! I want to hear the lines. These are funny interchanges thrown away totally. It’s madness from the director and from the company. As for me, I am furious that I was unable to turn out for my local football team on Saturday. They might not have lost if I had. Just because I’m over seventy and overweight should not preclude me from playing. I will give of my very best. Why only yesterday, I beat a four year old who couldn’t take the ball off me.

Yes, if you have one leg you can’t play professional football. The RSC isn’t just professional football. It’s Premier league, and not only Premier League but the Big Six in the Premier league. If you’re deaf and mute, it is not a joy to watch you trying to recite the best lines in our language. And guess what? None of the critics dared criticize it except as a note that BSL is used. Sam Marlowe in The i says:

The integration of British Sign Language into the ensemble work brings an elegant wit to the comedy, too.

No, it doesn’t. Really no!

The interaction between shepherd(ess) and the son is crucial, and both with Autolycus. If you look at the later plays, I believe Shakespeare had a solid older / younger ‘double act’. The gravediggers in Hamlet, the ship’s crew in The Tempest, the shepherd and son here. You can’t screw with it.

Having a shepherdess worked well … Zoe Lambert

Then we have gender (50% female in every play) and ethnicity. Gender for odd courtiers doesn’t usually matter. Shepherd to shepherdess works smoothly. Autolycus dosen’t matter at all either way. However, gender-switched casting of the surrounding courtiers in Sicilia’s means Hermione and Paulina are no longer isolated females against a male dominated world.

Check out the English language family names in the cast list. Most of them, like Polixines, are in fact Afro-Caribbean. I’d have to tell a white English male would-be actor not to bother nowadays. You are highly unlikely to get a part. In this play, as in Richard III where in one production we had a white Edward IV and Queen and black princes in the Tower, and you think, Richard of Gloucester is right. They’re illegitimate., it needs some thought. You have Polixenes who is black. Leontes is white. Hermione is mixed race, very light-skinned. Then we question Mamillius’s parentage, and to be honest I look at this ethically Middle Eastern / South Asian lad’s face, and think, ‘I’ll tell you something, Leontes and Polixenes, neither of you are his dad, that’s for sure. Not only that, it seems wildly unlikely that Hermione’s his mum.’ We DO look at children and say “She’s got her father’s eyes’ – and of course there is a long speech on just this in The Winter’s Tale.

So like you, ’tis the worse. Behold, my lords,
Although the print be little, the whole matter
And copy of the father, eye, nose, lip,
The trick of his frown, his forehead, nay, the valley,
The pretty dimples of his chin and cheek,
His smiles,
The very mould and frame of hand, nail, finger:
And thou, good goddess Nature, which hast made it
So like to him that got it, if thou hast
The ordering of the mind too, ‘mongst all colours
No yellow in’t, lest she suspect, as he does,
Her children not her husband’s!

At the end, we agreed that it was a poor production by RSC standards. It was supposed to tour, and let’s be frank, you don’t get Anthony Sher or Kenneth Branagh signing up for a provincial theatre tour. What’s odd is Erika Whyman’s track record is first-rate, including her brilliant A Midsummer Night’s Dream- A Play for The Nation and the 2018 Romeo & Juliet

Karen has never liked the play (A-level English can really put you off things) but we agreed it was just about the weakest version we’ve seen, at least since a dreadful 1970s Nuffield Southampton version with a clockwork bear running along a track above the stage.

My rating?

WHAT THE CRITICS SAID

****
Dominic Maxwell, The Times ****
The Stage ****

***

Arifa Akhbar, The Guardian ***

“Joseph Kloska plays King Leontes as a hysterical brute who is caught in the grip of high-pitched paranoia, his courtiers too mealy-mouthed to make a stand against his conspiracy theory that his “slippery” wife is having an affair with Polixenes (Andrew French). Only the fierce Paulina is brave enough to make a stand (“You’re liars, all”) and Amanda Hadingue’s impassioned performance is a highlight alongside Kemi-Bo Jacobs’s stoic, steely Hermione.“

Domenic Cavendish, The Telegraph ***

Sam Marlowe, The i ***

This is, in one respect, a historic cultural event – the first ever televised Royal Shakespeare Company world premiere. Otherwise, Erica Whyman’s production is solid rather than exceptional … The integration of British Sign Language into the ensemble work brings an elegant wit to the comedy, too. Yet for all its intelligence, the staging doesn’t have quite enough impact, never fully accessing either the play’s wonderment or its emotional gut-punch.

**
Sarah Crompton, What’s On Stage **

“What’s odd then, is that director Erica Whyman seems to have no particular view of the play she wants to get across. Maybe I am missing something, but short of shifting the action, first to the 1950s when the play opens in Sicily and the jealous Leontes accuses his wife Hermione of having an affair with his best friend, and then to 16 years later in the swinging ’60s in Bohemia, there is no radical rethinking on offer. … Worst of all, though the play has been restaged for TV, no one seems to have thought much about how it will come over on screen. There is a lot of theatrical shouting and gesturing. Joseph Koska’s Leontes seems to be addressing some of his mad soliloquies and his dictatorial demands directly to camera; at other times he looks at a non-existent audience. There is a lack of focus which undermines the performance

OTHER VERSIONS OF THE WINTER’S TALE ON THIS BLOG:

The Winter’s Tale – RSC 2013
The Winter’s Tale – Branagh, Kenneth Branagh Company, 2015
The Winter’s Tale – Wanamaker Playhouse, 2016
The Winter’s Tale – Cheek by Jowl on tour, Bath 2017
The Winter’s Tale – Globe 2018
The Winter’s Tale, RSC on BBC4, 2021
The Winter’s Tale, Wanamaker & Globe 2023

Peter Viney's Blog

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