Stage-to-screen review: Lights Up - The Winter's Tale

The RSC's a funny old company, isn't it? At one time considered downright avant-garde, in the last four decades its reputation has gone to the opposite extreme, as a byword for safe, old-fashioned, "heritage" Shakespeare. Nowadays I'd say it sometimes tries (with wildly varying levels of success) to push the envelope, but for the most part slips back into the kind of Shakespeare that reveres the text just that little bit too much over the theatricality. They make for an odd choice to provide the longest, largest-scale entry in the BBC's Lights Up festival, following as they do a lot of new writing with small casts and current concerns. Exactly what concerns Erica Whyman's production of The Winter's Tale deals with is anybody's guess, as apart from a couple of neat design ideas I came out of it with not much clue as to how Whyman interprets the odd, bleak story of Sicilian king Leontes (Joseph Kloska,) who essentially has a complete personality change mid-sentence, accusing his wife Hermione (Kemi-Bo Jacobs) and best friend Polixenes (Andrew French) of having an affair.

His out-of-nowhere jealousy destroys his family and even results in numerous deaths; the only hope is in Polixenes' kingdom of Bohemia, where Leontes and Hermione's newborn daughter Perdita is hidden away for her own safety. 16 years later she and Polixenes' son fall in love, and if they can overcome their own series of obstacles they can reunite the kingdoms.

Regular readers of this blog will both know The Winter's Tale is among my least favourite Shakespeare plays. Like most of them it has the potential to surprise you and offer up much for reinterpretation, but it's particularly full of traps that can make it painfully dull, and Whyman's production falls into all of them. Leontes' sudden madness is a riddle that I've seen various productions hint at different interpretations of, but this one doesn't have one: It doesn't make sense, it just happens, here's three acts of him relentlessly screaming a false accusation at his wife, that nobody believes for a second but they can't do anything about it because he's the king. The actors all seem to have settled on an old-fashioned, declamatory style - perhaps because this part of the story has been set in the 1950s - that flattens the mood from the start, and even the arrival of Paulina (Amanda Hadingue) couldn't get me interested again.

Much is made of how abrupt the tonal change is after the 16-year time jump, but what I think is really fascinating is how the sheep-shearing festival can sometimes elevate the whole rest of the play, while in other productions it's a brief blip of levity that's soon swallowed up again by the general tone of dread (even in the more fairytale-like second half, Polixenes' own violent mood swing, this time against his son, can cast a dark cloud over the sunny festival.) Despite this production having an unusually vibrant Perdita and Florizel in Georgia Landers and Assad Zaman, making the most of a couple of the blander Shakespearean young lovers, the festival scenes never quite come to life. Perhaps in part because the design conceit - that the first scenes take place in 1953, making the Bohemian ones 1969 - isn't driven home enough to give the festival the Woodstock feel that was surely the intention.

Elsewhere Tom Piper's set designs are mainly memorable for the motif of white sheets falling to the stage in various shapes: Very effective when one turns into the baby's swaddling clothes, and when several shimmer and reveal Hermione's statue, but you'd think someone would have spotted that the inverted canopy over the scenes of Leontes' madness looks like a giant pillowy anus hanging over the stage, possibly about to make its own harsh critique. The production was in rehearsals when the first lockdown began, so it never opened to audiences: I'd be interested to know if it would have kept the courage of its convictions in the casting of D/deaf actors in a couple of roles, including William Grint as the clownish Young Shepherd; for TV their lines are subtitled, but you can also see how they're playing with the idea of integrating the other characters translating BSL into English into the story organically. Deafinitely and the Globe have been working on ways of doing this for years, and it can be done without surtitles in a way that makes a hearing audience feel brought into the characters' world.

The bear, by the way, is done through the gift of interpretative dance, and I couldn't decide if I thought this was a cop-out or not; I guess it's an upgrade from the RSC's last production doing it through the gift of motion sickness. There's a few highlights in here but by the time you get to them I'm afraid most TV viewers who think they don't like theatre would have had their opinion confirmed and turned off: A winter to join the bear and hibernate through.

The Winter's Tale by William Shakespeare is streaming on BBC iPlayer until April 2022 as part of the Lights Up season.

Running time: 2 hours 50 minutes.

Photo credit: Topher McGrillis