Theatre reviews: The Winter’s Tale | Old Blood

THE intention to update the quite conservative message of Shakepeare’s strange comedy is a noble one but isn’t achieved apart from in one thrilling moment, writes Joyce McMillan.

The Winter’s Tale, Edinburgh Festival Theatre

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Old Blood, Oran Mor Glasgow

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HERE’S my advice about the Royal Shakespeare Company’s big, gorgeous and lengthy production of Shakespeare’s The Winter’s Tale, at Edinburgh Festival Theatre this week. If you are interested in theatre as an art-form with a radical history and transformative powers, then go along to the Festival Theatre, purchase a copy of the Winter’s Tale programme, take it home, and read it. It’s an enthralling publication, full of fierce insights into the conflicts of class and gender that underpin Shakespeare’s great, mysterious romance; and it seems to promise the best kind of RSC production: radical, well-resourced, insightful, brilliant.

If, on the other hand, you just want a good, prestigious night out, designed to tell a rattling good yarn with spectacular CGI film effects and a big cast led by star actors, then go along and see the show, which opened to a packed 1700-strong house of delighted Edinburgh theatregoers on Tuesday evening. In crowd-pleasing and sensational dramatic style, The Winter’s Tale tells the story of a king of Sicilia, Leontes, who suddenly goes mad with sexual jealousy on seeing his pregnant wife, Hermione, playing the affectionate hostess to his old friend Polixenes, king of Bohemia.

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Within a few short, sharp scenes – played with terrific briskness, and a fine and lurid sense of drama, in Lucy Bailey’s production – Leontes has brutalised and imprisoned his lovely wife, attempted to murder Polixenes, caused the death from grief of his beloved young son, condemned his newborn baby daughter to be abandoned in wild place, and – apparently – also lost his wife, who, after a show trial, is said to have died in despair.

Then, almost without pause, the play moves on from this exposé of patriarchal power at its insane worst, to a meditation of sorts on the relationship between the aristocracy and the lower orders, as the abandoned baby princess, Perdita, is found and brought up in Bohemia by two simple shepherds, only – through her natural aristocracy of looks and bearing – to win the love of Polixenes’s son, Prince Florizel.

The problem with all this, though, is that Shakespeare’s view of these matters is overwhelmingly conservative; he cannot help telling the dramatic truth about how patriarchal and aristocratic power is abused, but never seriously suggests that it should be overturned – only that patriarchs and princes should repent their sins, “awake their faith”, and learn how to wield power better.

It therefore takes a real radicalism of theatrical means and technique to break open a play like The Winter’s Tale, and present it in ways that ask significant questions of a 21st-century audience. And for all her good intentions, director Bailey never looks like achieving that, instead allowing her vision of class dissonance between the soft south and the hard north-west to be swamped by a huge digital screen showing storms and sea-coasts and a giant sea-bear (“exit, pursued by a bear”, reads the famous stage direction), and a set featuring a large hydraulically driven metal tower, which is supposed to say something about class relations, but visually conveys nothing of the sort; as well as by acres of conventional Shakespearean acting, firm in its conviction that serious characters have posh voices, and that the lower orders are there to be laughed at, or to entertain us with jolly Morris dancing.

There is just one moment in the production – just one, in three hours and ten minutes – when a shiver of real challenge runs across the stage. It comes during the obligatory final dance, when Tara Fitzgerald’s beautiful Hermione and Rakie Avola’s powerful Paulina, the serving woman who saves her life, briefly partner each other at the front of the stage, exchanging a look of recognition and salute that foreshadows a millennium of feminist change.

For the rest, though, it’s all fine costumes, big visuals, and no challenge at all to a world in which aristocrats matter, and the rest of us are just joke characters; and in this week of all weeks, in Britain of all countries, that just won’t do.

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Over at Oran Mor, meanwhile, this week’s lunchtime Play Pie and Pint show offers the rare spectacle of a hugely talented team – writer Morna Pearson, and director Jemima Levick of Dundee Rep – presenting a project that just doesn’t seems ready, either as a play or as a performance. There’s a huge, tantalising measure of potential in Old Blood, which reflects Pearson’s vision of what happens to elderly couple Annie and Johnny after she begins to suffer from dementia, and moves into a home. Not content with the usual elegiac play about the pain and misery of this cruel disease, Pearson conjures up a brilliant neo-Doric fantasy-world in which Annie and Johnny – played with great feeling by Barbara Rafferty and Sean Scanlan – are offered a second chance of life as vampires, sucking the blood of others, recovering their youth, and living for ever, in the cold world of the undead.

The real story of the play lies in their decision to refuse the offer, for better or worse, and there’s a poignancy to it, and a mighty vividness in Pearson’s writing, that finally moves many of the audience to tears.

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At the moment, though, the key central section of the play, in which the choice presents itself, is so messily written and raggedly performed that it’s difficult to follow what’s happening. And if it’s clear that there’s something well worth developing, in this strikingly original take on one of the dominant themes of the decade, it’s also clear that much more work is needed, to give Pearson’s vision real theatrical life.

PERFORMANCE OF THE WEEK

The RSC production of The Winter’s Tale is a crowd-pleasing blockbuster movie of modern theatre; but at the heart of it, there’s a beautiful performance from film, television and stage star Tara Fitzgerald as the pregnant queen Hermione, abused, imprisoned and accused of adultery by her crazed husband. In the play’s final scenes, she makes us feel the driving mother-love for her lost daughter that has kept Hermione alive through 16 long years of virtual death; and in its closing moment, she allows us to glimpse the rock-solid alliance with her lady-in-waiting, Paulina, which has endured the tempest of insane male power, and taken its chance to make things right again, at last.

• The Winter’s Tale is at Edinburgh Festival Theatre, and Old Blood at Oran Mor, Glasgow, both until Saturday.

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