Part
1
Play: The Winter’s Tale
by William Shakespeare
Vision: I imagine a version of The
Winter’s Tale that revolves firmly around its three major female characters,
particularly around Hermione. By downplaying the male roles, I hope to focus on
the theme of female influence being necessary to temper male impulses, and on
the intelligence, dignity, and grace with which the play’s women behave. If
many of Shakespeare’s plays are about the tragedies of noble men who act basely
or foolishly, then this production is about the wonder of noble women who act
with compassion and forethought.
Time and Place: Pseudo-Classical Sicilia and Pastoral Bohemia. That
is to say, not anything historically accurate, but more along the lines of the
way in which Renaissance and Baroque artists imagined the Classical past. The play itself is something of a
fairytale, and so the setting should reflect this fanciful nature. Picture
something out of a painting by Titian or Claude Lorrain: the ruins are already
artfully ruinous, the women are dressed in bright colors and draped decoratively
over scenery, the wilds are lush and nonthreatening. Sicilia appears the way
that Ancient Greece often does in television shows more interested in spectacle
than realism. It is the sort of place Ovid imagined when he spoke of the Golden
Age. Its idyllic civility makes the sudden turn into chaos brought on by
Leontes’s madness all the more shocking. Bohemia, too, is a place out of myth,
but more along the lines of Arcadia than Olympus.
Staging:
A relatively small, proscenium stage seems
best for The Winter’s Tale. The play
is largely about secrets and revelation, and so forcing characters into closer
proximity cranks up the tension. There should be room enough for characters to
pace and to dance, but as little unused space as possible. The main stage is
used for those scenes set in the palace of Sicilia and the forest of Bohemia, as
these are the two central locations for the play. A curtain can be drawn across
in front of the set for all other scenes. A great deal of the setting, mood,
and passage of time will be conveyed not through set but through lighting. The
main stage set for the two locations is blocked out much the same.
Sicilia’s
palace consists of twelve columns made up to look like marble, standing in a
semi-circle. Black painted flats form a semi-circular back wall, two or three
feet behind the columns. There is an elevated platform—three feet high or
so—between the two central columns, against this backdrop. This serves
variously throughout the play, including as a sort of coffee table for hand
props such as food and drinks during Act I Scene II, the place where Antigonus
leaves the infant Perdita in Act III Scene III, and the dais on which Hermione
stands during the pivotal statue scene in Act V Scene III. Characters enter and
exit downstage right and left, between the downstage columns and the curtain. The
rest of the space between the columns and backdrop can be used by characters
who are onstage but meant to remain unobtrusive for large parts of the scene,
such as when Camillo acts as cupbearer in Act I Scene II. Three plush chairs
should be arranged upstage center, in front of the platform, where Leontes,
Polixenes, and Hermione begin Act I Scene II seated.
The
set for Bohemia’s forest is oriented in exactly the same way, though the
columns are replaced by flowering trees and the chairs are replaced by a large
rock upon which Perdita is sitting at the top of Act IV Scene IV, to align her
with the infant who is last seen on the platform immediately behind the rock.
As for that infant, the prop doesn’t need to be anything more than a bundle of
blankets. Sound effects will be much more convincing than any sort of doll. The
light in the forest is dappled and multicolored, almost like a stained-glass
window, with gobos used to project the shape of branches onto the back wall.
Characters:
Hermione
is, perhaps, the most important role in this production. The actress should
look relatively young, but not nearly as young as the actress cast to play
Perdita. She is a woman in her prime—self-possessed and regal—not a fanciful
girl. That is not to say, however than she is in any way cold. On the contrary,
Hermione in the opening act should exude warmth and good cheer. She is a
genuinely kind woman who enjoys life and cares for the people around her. Hermione
is charming, both to the audience and the characters around her. It is this
charm that engender loyalty in characters like Camillo and Paulina. It is also this charm that leads her insecure
husband into maddening jealousy when he misinterprets her friendly affection
for Polixenes as sign of an elicit romance. The audience, however, should be
able to see Hermione’s clear devotion to her husband and son. They have to care
about her, otherwise her “death” and resurrection have no real impact.
Leontes
too, has to carry much of the weight of this play. He cannot be entirely
loathsome. We have to feel at least a little bit bad for him in his grief, if
only so that we can be happy for Perdita and Hermione when they are able to
reunite with him. However, he should be at least somewhat irritating in the first
scene. He talks too loudly and gestures to widely. His charm is forced, where
Hermione’s is natural. Though he is a man in his middle age, he still has
something of a frat boy aura about him. He’s the sort of man you enjoy at
parties but roll your eyes at when he overstays his welcome. This immature,
somewhat insecure persona sets the stage for his sudden turn to jealousy and
rage at the end of Act I. He sees Hermione’s ease with Polixenes and assumes
that his beautiful, charming wife has cuckolded him, not because she has
actually done anything to warrant such an assumption, but because he cannot
stand to see her succeed where he failed in convincing his friend to stay, and
because he cannot bear to see her attention on anyone else.
Paulina
and Perdita are also key roles here, but largely in how they relate to
Hermione. It is these two who carry the play forward while Hermione is offstage
for most of the second half, but her presence should be felt in both of them.
For Perdita, this is fairly easy. The actress cast should look as much like the
actress playing Hermione as possible, though clearly younger. She wears the
same sort of light and airy fabrics that we see her mother in at the beginning
of the play, and there are flowers in her hair throughout. Paulina’s actress will
likely have more difficulty. She too should look somewhat like Hermione, though
not so much that they are mistaken for actual mother and daughter. The connection
between them should be felt more in their mannerisms. Paulina should be just as
regal as Hermione, holding herself as straight and aloof from the other
characters onstage as the queen does in the trial scene. She should also adopt
as many of Hermione’s mannerisms as possible, particularly gestural ones.
Key Scenes:
As
this production is largely built around Hermione and her journey, the three
scenes I’ve chosen to focus on also revolve around her. The first is Act I
Scene II, in which we should see Hermione, Polixenes, and Leontes begin the
play as easy friends, sitting in the chairs of the palace set and drinking,
laughing, and talking. Hermione and Leontes sit to either side of their friend,
signaling the breach between them he will soon become. Her hair is down, with
flowers woven through it, both to show her vitality and to align her with
Perdita. She draws Polixenes out of his chair and coaxes him to stay with them
for a while longer, taking up space on the stage with ease and grace. This is
then contrasted with Leontes, who paces and gesticulates wildly as he
monologues to Camillo about Hermione’s supposed infidelity. When Camillo is
eventually left alone onstage, he slumps into Polixenes’s vacated chair and
addresses much of his soliloquy to Hermione’s seat, as an expression of his
sympathy for her.
The
next vital scene is Act I Scene II, in which Hermione first hears Leontes’s
accusations. Mamillius is plucking the flowers from her hair as she carries him
onstage at the top of the act, foreshadowing her own fall. Here is the first
time we see her shift from the warmth she shows at the play’s start. She does
not yet become cold when first accused, but she does stand straighter. We get a
glimpse in this scene of the iron-hard queen behind her playful nature.
This
is then doubled down upon in the court scene in Act III Scene I. The flowers
are gone from Hermione’s hair, and it is bound up, though raggedly, to signify
her imprisonment. She has put off the bright colors she wore at the start and
now wears drab brown or grey. Leontes’s rage has been hot and fast and
unpredictable up to this point, but here we finally see Hermione’s anger. She
is glacial and still, fixing both characters and audience with her furious
gaze. She does not yell, though her husband does. Instead, she is the quietest
we have yet seen her, but forceful. Though Hermione is often portrayed as
despairing and pleading in this scene, in this production she should be
furious. Her children have been stolen from her, one of them presumably to be
murdered, and her reputation has been destroyed. The only moment we see the
grief beneath the rage is in her aside about her father at line 127. She holds
herself rigid and aloof, almost taunting Leontes, driving him to greater and
greater fits of insecure fury until he defies the oracle. Hermione—and indeed
all the characters onstage—cannot hide her shock at this, and when the
messenger announces Mamillius’s death it is finally too much, and she
collapses. Confronted with the consequences of his actions, Leontes deflates,
going quiet and shrinking in on himself. Paulina should weep genuinely over
Hermione’s prone form, and when she returns to announce her death, it should
seem as if she has absorbed all of the queen’s rage and is now unleashing it on
Leontes.
Hermione’s
final transformation is in the play’s final scene. A curtain has been drawn on
the dais upstage and stairs now lead down from it. When Paulina draws the
curtain, we see Hermione, head down, lit from directly above so as to cast her
face in shadow. Though she was still in the trial scene, she is now even more
so, standing relaxed but cold as stone. She wears heavy, white robes and her
hair is up neatly. It has been dusted with powder, both to give the appearance
of age and to make her seem more like the marble she is pretending to be. Paulina
should be dressed almost identically, though the cut of her dress should suit
her greater age (e.g. the collar should be high and the sleeves long. She should
look matronly, but not fussy). This costuming aligns the two of them further,
highlighting how they have worked together to orchestrate the ruse, as well as
how Hermione (who is now dressed in the same stiff and light-colored clothing
Paulina has worn throughout) has finally achieved Paulina’s wisdom. She raises
her head when Paulina bids her to move, and Leontes promptly falls to his
knees, hiding his face until she descends the dais to stand before him and take
his hand, like a benediction. When she speaks to Perdita, she does so slowly,
as if she were still half statue. She should dwarf the other characters on the
stage, save for Paulina, who moves to stand with the two as Hermione gives
Perdita her blessing. The three form a triad of womanhood—maiden, mother, and
crone—while the men look on in wonder.
Part 2
Vision: The Globe’s production of The Winter’s Tale, directed by Blanche McIntyre, took a very
different approach to the one I outlined. Where my version of the play focused primarily
on the character of Hermione and her relationships with Paulina and Perdita, this
production focused much more on Leontes’s relationships to those around him. In
the second half of the play, where Leontes is mostly offstage, the focus shifted
more towards Florizell, Polixenes, and Camillo. This aligns with more traditional
interpretations of the play, in which the story is largely about the roles of
men and the relationships between them, and the women are primarily tools used
to facilitate those roles and relationships.
Staging (set): As with all of this season’s Globe productions,
McIntyre’s set is minimalist in the extreme. Ironically, both her set and mine
involve large columns, but where mine were designed according to the play, hers
are fixtures of the stage itself. The relatively small cast struggles to fill
such a large space on the stage, though they make especially good use of the
downstage space for soliloquies and other intimate and emotionally charged
scenes. It works particularly well for Leontes’s ravings, as he was so dwarfed
by the stage itself that he seemed truly isolated by his madness.
Staging (costuming): The most obvious technical decision McIntyre
has made is to costume the Sicilian characters in period garb—Classical robes,
gowns, and armor—and the Bohemians in vibrant modern dress. In the play’s very
first scene, the audience is treated to the sight of Camillo, dressed in a
knee-length robe of somber navy, beside Archidamus—here played by Annette
Badland—in an oatmeal cardigan and brightly colored floral pants, visibly
texting on what is quite clearly an iPhone. This divide continues as we see
Leontes dressed in a fussily embroidered set of robes and slippers while Polixenes
wears a simple summer suit. The effect makes Polixenes and his servants look ill
at ease in the Sicilian court, clearly illustrating their national differences
and just how out of touch he and Leontes truly are after so many years, but it doesn’t
reach its full effect until after the intermission.
Characters: Leontes carried nearly all the weight of this
production, especially in the first half. This isn’t because the rest of the
cast is lacking—far from it—but because McIntyre’s production clearly takes the
most interest in his character. He begins the play as a likeable and nervous,
if not entirely charming, man. That nervousness rapidly escalates into madness
as he sees Hermione and Polixenes whispering together and immediately starts to
spiral. His gestures are fidgety, and he moves constantly, his voice sounding weak,
strained and breaking even while the actor projects perfectly, speaking the
lines with enough hissing crispness to sound both intelligent and insane. It
is, at least at first, bordering on comical, making the slip-slide into violence
all the more startling. And yet this Leontes is almost likeable. He is too bumbling to hate, and too nonthreatening to be
irritating, the way my Leontes was. He seems genuinely afflicted, rather than
merely jealous, and so the audience finds themselves wishing for him to come to
his senses rather than wishing to see him punished.
Paulina
acts as a foil to Leontes in their scenes together, and she is the unchallenged
mastermind of the plot to save the kingdom. Like Leontes, she is never still on
the stage, but where he squirms and paces, she looms and chases him across the
floor. She even wears a colorful cape for her first scene, making her
physically larger and more imposing. In the scene where she confronts him with
the infant Perdita, Paulina literally matches all of Leontes’s movements,
heading him off each time he tries to get away, herding him around the stage
like a sheepdog. She shouts and grapples, where Hermione remained fairly quiet even
in her extremis and never allowed herself to be touched by her captors.
Key Scenes:
Act
IV Scene I- By placing the intermission between Acts III and IV, it emphasized
the transition from Sicilia to Bohemia, giving Time’s monologue pride of place
at the top of the second half. Admittedly, this is where most directors put the
interim, but McIntyre took full advantage of the transition to move from what
was, aside from the Bohemian visitors, a fairly ordinary set of directorial
choices for Sicilia into a riotous and thoroughly modern—perhaps even bohemian—Bohemia.
Time is played by a tiny actress and wears a simple buttoned shirt and jeans, leaning
on a far larger-than-life bear skull. After the doom and gloom of the trial
scene, it’s almost whimsical. The skull also serves as a visual metaphor to
signal that the dangers of the play’s first half are over and done with. The
bear—and all it stands for—is conquered. Interestingly, Time is played by the
same actress who played Mamillius just a few scenes before. Though the young
prince is dead, this offers a strange sense of closure for him, as if he is now
watching over his younger sister.
Act
IV Scene IV- Given this production’s focus on the romances of the play, this
scene with Florizell and Perdita is critical. Luke MacGregor gives a fantastic
performance as a Florizell who clearly has genuine feelings for Perdita, but
who is also clearly just as in love with his youthful rebellion as with Perdita
in particular. He spends most of the scene sipping from a can of cheap beer,
leaping around coltishly and pulling Perdita close. His exuberance highlights
just how young Florizell really is,
making the comparison between him and Mamillius work especially well. The
actual dancing was more of a hectic tangle of limbs gyrating to modern pop
music, all of it in the upstage discovery space. It was a good signal of just
how informal an environment the Shepherdess’s house was, compared to Sicilia’s
court, but placing it within the discovery space was confusing and made much of
the scene invisible to a sizable part of the audience.
Act
V Scene III- Like in my production, the Statue Scene had Hermione stand in the
discovery space, hidden by a curtain, but the similarities all but ended there.
Paulina quite clearly owned this scene in McIntyre’s production, with little or
no input from Hermione, and with Perdita practically hidden by one of the
columns. Hermione stands in a dancer’s pose, hair and gown the same as she wore
in Act I. When she descends the pedestal, she needs physical help, as if she
truly has been frozen for the intervening years. This certainly heightens the
magical air of the scene, increasing the sense of wonder, but it does not lend
Hermione any sense of strength. She physically hangs off of Leontes and can barely
face Perdita. The only character who seems to gain any strength in this scene is Leontes, who finally stops
stooping and regains some of the life we saw in him before the madness took
hold. Even Paulina becomes somewhat subdued after the reunion. It’s as if she
has fulfilled her role and can fade into the background now that Leontes has
been restored to his sanity and happiness. In the end, the scene functions more
to undo the tragedies of the first half than as a starting point for something
new. This struck me as ineffective. After all, some of the losses in the play cannot be recovered, no matter how much
Leontes wants to replace Mamillius with Florizell.
Final Evaluation: I appreciated the creativity of McIntyre’s choice
to modernize Bohemia and leave Sicilia as a period setting. I think it not only
made for an interesting update on the pastoral imagery, it also highlighted how
Bohemia—for all it is criticized in the play’s first scene as backwards—is more
open to progress, free from Sicilia’s stifling court culture. Importantly,
Bohemia is the only place where children—a very real symbol of progress—can thrive.
This furthers the production’s focus on the younger generation and how they can
redeem their elders, particularly Leontes. However, this also points to my
major problem with this production. This production shows a great deal of
sympathy for Leontes. By using the scene in which Perdita and Florizell beg for
Leontes’s help to redeem him by showing how benevolent he is to these two progressive
children, and then using the Statue Scene to restore him to happiness and power,
the play implicitly forgives the king for all of his misdeeds. By framing his
behavior as actual madness, rather than simply mad jealousy, it absolves him of
his very real misogyny and implies that all his bad behavior is over. It gives
the entire story the air of a self-contained episode. A blip in an otherwise
smooth trajectory. It lacks genuine character development if things effectively
go back to the way they were. This is a major problem with staging Shakespeare’s
comedies in the 21st century. Like many of the others, The Winter’s Tale is in many ways about
a restoration of social order after a fall to chaos. But if that restoration
does not also include a refiguring of
that social order—like the feminine rise to power I proposed—the ending strikes
modern audiences as less than happy.
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