Abstract
The marketing posters and leaflets for this production describe Cymbeline as ‘[a] dark fairytale [that] comes to life …’ and Gregory Doran, in his final show for the Royal Shakespeare Company (RSC) as artistic director, has interpreted Shakespeare's late play as a cross between a Disney extravaganza and a sci-fi thriller. This did result in some tonal contradictions – between the neatly balanced Jacobean court and louche libertinism of the wager scene, on the one hand, and the Narnia-like archers of Guiderius and Arviragus on the other. But this disjunction is not necessarily a departure from the wrenches of Shakespeare's play and, apart from the intrusive second interval (more like a five-minute pause for fussily striking and resetting stage furniture), the production felt a lot shorter than its three-and-a-half hours.
As befits the fairytale genre, Alexandra Gilbreath's wicked stepmother sported a Cruella de Vil, piled, black wig complete with a white shock, and Conor Glean's Bart Simpson column of hair made his Cloten similarly cartoonish. His irascible (ex)Plosive pronunciation of ‘PPPPosthumus’ and his petulant stamping, ensured that he never constituted a danger to be taken seriously – perhaps one of the production's few shortcomings. Against this caricatured court, Peter de Jersey's eponymous monarch was a 3D, raging tyrant, capable of sudden and quite unwarranted outbursts of violence – a severe Lear inserted incongruously into this world of make-believe (but again, that is Shakespeare's not Doran's fault).
Stephen Brimson Lewis's set comprised a conspicuous proscenium arch that picture-framed the action – there was no danger of taking this as anything other than ‘an improbable fiction’ (Twelfth Night, 3.4.125). Above the stage was suspended a huge disc that acted at points as a sun, a moon, and a colossal searchlight. In the play's closing sequence, it was blindingly illuminated to cast shadows all round before blacking out (lighting by Matt Daw). The play's most conspicuous reference to the sun is in the mournful dirge over the corpse of Fidele: ‘Fear no more the heat o’th’ sun’ (4.2.259) but perhaps the star's continual presence hinted at the play's sunny outcome: ‘Pardon's the word to all’ (5.6.423). Doran thus gave the play's magic its full rein and Jupiter's entry in the final act was suitably hyperbolic. An actor lowered from the flies in a throne, in full gold body paint, a Greek tragedy mask with gaping mouth and a booming voiceover from Patrick Stewart was set against the projection of two huge flapping wings (the stage direction has the god ‘sitting upon an eagle’, 5.5.187).
In all these ways, Doran had matched his production, design, costumes and setting to the play's larger-than-life aesthetic. But, ingeniously, he had also managed to make the production focus tightly on the personal, the domestic and the psychological. Key here was the constantly anxious Pisanio (Mark Hadfield), left to fend for himself after the banishment of his master, Posthumus (Ed Sayer), and the wonderfully deft and capricious Imogen (Amber James). Her breathless eagerness to be reunited with Posthumus was pure gushing Rosalind: ‘who long'st – / O let me bate – but not like me – yet long'st / But in a fainter kind – O, not like me, / For mine's beyond beyond …’ (3.2.53–6). Yet, just two scenes later, she was tearfully begging Pisanio to kill her: ‘The lamb entreats the butcher’ (3.4.96).
The wager scene was set around a candle-lit banquet with Philario's guests lolling in silk dressing gowns over bare chests. Posthumus's entry, in buttoned up tunic, nicely contrasted his British stiffness with their relaxed Italian informality. Jamie Wilkes's Iachimo was a droopily mustached rake, reeling the prickly Posthumus into his snare. There was a particularly sneering delivery of ‘If she be furnished with a mind so rare / She is alone’ (1.6.16–17), which thinly veiled a bitter misogyny. But later, we saw Iachimo's preening confidence suddenly evaporate as Imogen repulsed his seduction and his request (that she shelter the valuable contents of his trunk) was delivered with a note of desperation – this really was his last-ditch attempt to gain access to her. If anything his sudden remorse in one of the play's many final-act reversals was, in accordance with the play's wholesale reliance on the implausible, too good to be true.
If the production slowed anywhere it was in the Welsh scenes, as more could have been pruned here. Oddly, while the script makes such a fuss about the boys refusing to sing over Fidele's corpse (see Deannna Smid's excellent ‘Spoken song and imagined music in Cymbeline’, Cahiers Elisabethains, 102[1], 2020, pp. 87–102), here they attempted to do so in a painfully out of tune ‘harmony’, compelling Scott Gutteridge (Guiderius) and Daf Thomas (Arviragus) to tiptoe along the edge of falsetto with inevitable discords and dropoffs in volume (Ben McQuigg was musical director). The moving poetry of the funeral was obscured here by a vocal incompetence.
The final battle scenes were textbook Doran – slo-mo, elaborate choreography – and the play's incredible denouements were a mixture of the comic and the intensely moving. Again, this is woven into Cymbeline's motley fabric and by positioning the text's humour on the very verge of tragedy, Doran ably realised the play's contradictory spirit. It was – as the final play included in the Folio – a fitting send-off.