‘It’s a game of two halves’ is one of those annoying but somehow endearing tautologies so beloved of football commentators. Even middle-class football fans are unlikely to need reminding of this basic fact about the beautiful game: what the pundits are really pointing out is that the halves of any given game may differ greatly and the result is never known until full time.
Shakespeare’s are plays of five acts that fall into three categories: Comedies, Tragedies and Histories. This is all very well with the likes of Merry Wives, Lear and Henry V but it breaks down with some of the later plays. The Winter’s Tale is one of these ‘problem’ plays: it’s a comedy in that it ends happily but it’s hard to imagine a more tragic hero than Leontes even though he does get off comparatively lightly.
David Farr’s RSC production, currently at the Courtyard Theatre in Stratford-on-Avon, is a play of two halves. Greg Hicks gives an astonishing performance as Leontes, King of Sicilia, a part many actors denounce as simply unplayable. Leontes has exactly 14 lines before he descends into madness but Hicks does not waste a syllable or an instant of stage time. He manages to retain the sympathy of the audience throughout Leontes’ jealous journey from groundless doubt to deluded certainty of his wife’s infidelity with his best friend Polixenes, King of Bohemia. It is like watching a fantastic fusion of Macbeth with Othello.
Designer Jon Bausor does not let Hicks down. Sicilia is a spiky, bookish, buttoned-up kingdom where even the Christmas dinner that opens the play has a formal, fusty feel to it. Leontes is suffocated by the stale air in his library as much as by his suspicions. The true extent of Bausor’s skill is only revealed just before the interval when the action switches to Bohemia and the bookshelves crash and collapse onto the stage, strewing it with papers and parchment that become trees, Morris men and even the Bohemian bear from the play’s and Shakespeare’s most famous stage direction.
The second half is in a different tone altogether. Colour, dance and song appear on the stage, mostly in the form of Samantha Young’s Perdita. Brian Doherty does his best with the impenetrable Autolycus and Larrington Walker and Gruffudd Glynn are good comedy value as Old and Young Shepherd respectively. It can be awkward for audiences to feel at home in a rural idyll after the high drama of the first half but there is no such difficulty in this production” the change of pace and tone is welcome.
The return to Sicillia in Act V allows Noma Dumezweni to complete her measured and moving performance as Paulina and heralds the reappearance of Hicks to whom both halves of this excellent production belong.
The Winter’s Tale is at The Courtyard Theatre until 3 October
