CHRIS ROPER loves the production but resents the author of The Winter’s Tale
Will Shakespeare peers smugly out of the homely imported foliage that flanks the Maynardville audience, his honest Englishman’s brow softened by the silvery uplight strategically placed to keep him visible throughout performances of his masterworks. Big Bard is watching you, but the surveillance doesn’t end there.
There’s a weight of tradition that also makes its presence felt. There are people picnicking before the show, sprawling on checked rugs or leaning on wicker baskets. Champagne corks pop, glasses are filled … Some of them have even brought along folding tables with matching chairs! These are the sort of people who sneer at yobs who eat dinner in front of the TV.
The climate’s delicate, the air most sweet, and the lovely Maynardville pond presents its pastoral visage to the picnickers. But if you walk around to its backside, you’re confronted by piles of garbage blown there by the Cape wind. The ducks pick their way around the polystyrene markers of a brasher, American colonialism. This would all make a lovely metaphor: behind the facade of English culture lurk the intrusive invaders of New World commercialism. Unfortunately, it isn’t true. There is nothing rotten with the state of Maynardville.
Mark Graham’s production of The Winter’s Tale makes no real effort to highlight the subversion that lurks in the heart of the play.
When you read the list of critics’ comments included in the programme, you realise that the evening is about homage. A who’s who of venerable Shakespearian old farts, the list includes the big daddies Leavis, Frye and Wilson Knight. It doesn’t help that The Winter’s Tale, with its artificial, tacked- on happy ending, is arguably Shakespeare’s worst play. Its strident sexism and stereotyped gender roles need to be counter-acted by a heavy directorial hand.
Hermione, Queen to Leontes, is the battered woman par excellence, so obedient to her husband that she even loves his friend, Polixenes, on command. Megan Willson is superb in the role of Hermione, making her a luminously tragic figure. But she needs to be complemented by an equally incandescent Paulina, and although Shirley Johnston’s performance is of the highest quality, the play has not been directed to emphasise that she is fighting for her friend’s life. Paulina is the wildcard in the stacked deck, but here she is made to appear more fishwife than feminist. Willson and Robyn Scott (Emilia, servant to Hermione) seem to play their roles as straight tragedy, but the audience is not interested in seeing two actresses who’ve got their hands on rare examples of feminist Shakespearean roles, and they laugh at all the wrong moments.
Martin le Maitre as Leontes becomes more impressive as the play progresses, especially once he has got the very unlikely opening dialogue out of the way. The opening is designed to make the audience believe they’re watching a comedy, always assuming that they find comments like ”My wife is slippery” funny (they still do). When you get to the tragic bits, the audience keeps laughing, albeit confusedly. Apparently aware of this, Shakespeare puts in a cretinous bit about lovable rustic buffoons.
Ultimately, it’s a production full of excellent things. Effective lighting, interesting music, and performances that, taken individually, deserve the highest praise. Akin Omotoso is particularly vibrant as Florizel, and Graham Weir really nasty as Autolycus. I suppose it is wrong to wish that Mark Graham had taken the opportunity to show a finger to Big Will’s obnoxious misogyny, for after all, the play’s the thing.
The Winter’s Tale is on at Maynardville in Cape Town until February 22