The Winter’s Tale

With the threatening presence of Jude Law’s Hamlet for the Donmar West End season, Sam Mendes’ The Winter’s Tale, as one might assume, featuring a cast of not as high-profile, and not as physically attractive actors, looks instantantly inferior. However, the much-delayed Bridge Project’s take on Shakespeare’s lesser-known romance proves to be a theatrical success vanquishing the Dane and putting the tourist-populated Globe productions to shame.

Conceptually for The Winter’s Tale, what else could be more representative of this transatlantic project than Mendes relocating Sicilia and Bohemia to England and the US in the 18th century? In the hands of the Oscar-winning director, the re-imagined locations manage to stave off tackiness. King Leontes’s English-Sicilian court is crippled by jealousy, uncontrollable rage and claustrophobic tragedy. There, time freezes in mourning. America/Bohemia is, by contrast, the land of joy, simplicity and immense opportunities that come in the form of a lost female baby with a head of gold. Cowboys and farm girls dance their day away in the great outdoors.

Without a doubt, it is Simon Russell Beale that delivers the star performance. Beale personates Leontes with a mighty interpretation that has long been lacking in the character. He not only brilliantly embodies the fits and the rage that jealousy entails but is almost apologetic of his own vice. From the start, there is a sense of incompatibility—a short, stout, and aged king versus a tall, slender, young, and beautiful queen—whilst Hermione’s bond with Leontes appears social rather than sexual. Rebecca Hall’s free-spirited and passionate Hermione seems to be better off with Josh Hamilton’s gay Polixenes rather than with Beale’s introverted Leontes. Alienated by his young queen whose head rests on Polixenes’s firm and youthful chest and whose hands gently caress the Bohemian king, Leontes is vulnerable—doomed by his own sense of insecurity and inferiority. The dimmed blue light while Beale delivers his soliloquy well confirms this moment of self-ostracism, of fear that he could lose all. Beale explains jealousy as reactionary—a protective father who strives to keep his family together.

Ironically, Hall’s queen is not entirely faultless, but she proves her innocence with a dramatic tearful breakdown. As for Leontes, by refusing to listen to his courtiers—by the likes of Sinead Cusack’s motherly Paulina and Dakin Matthews’ dutiful Antigonus—and Apollo’s oracle—the latter comes in form of a quill that writes by itself—he lets his ego get the best of him. Et voila! The tragedy is done.

Love—or the thought of losing it—is the driving force of the production. Sadly, there remains the unevenness in interpretation in the way-too-merry second half. Leading the troops is Ethan Hawke's abrasively funny shape-shifting Autolycus. The only criticism would be that if Mendes could not take Leontes for granted, he could definitely have done more to stop his American rodeos from becoming mere representatives of the ‘American dream’.