Branagh’s Dark Fairy Tale

Reviewing “live” productions broadcast from theatres in New York and the West End to movie houses has its problems. In Australia these are, of course, delayed broadcasts, but how can a reviewer get his article out in time for the reader to see the play on screen? At the time of writing, Rob Ashford and Kenneth Branagh’s production of The Winter’s Tale from London’s Garrick Theatre is no longer showing in Sydney. However, the art-houses such as the Dendy and Cremorne Orpheum do have revivals, and almost certainly there will be a DVD release. So in the hope that the broadcast will soon be available, here are my impressions of Branagh’s The Winter’s Tale.

Like so many contemporary productions of Shakespeare it is in semi-Victorian dress—a strange choice, one might think, for a romance set in a semi-mythological past. But this has become a tradition for Shakespearean production in the late twentieth and twenty-first centuries. The opening also includes a home movie. But Branagh does not overdo it, and the introduction of Christmas trees and an exchange of presents provides a powerful symbol of the harmony and order that will be shattered by King Leontes’s suspicions of his wife’s fidelity. (Reportedly Branagh based these Christmas scenes on Ingmar Bergman’s Fanny and Alexander.)

Then the warmth and festivity disintegrate. Compared to this King of Sicilia, who suddenly becomes irrationally jealous of his boyhood friend Polixenes’s friendship with his queen, Hermione, Othello is a model of restraint. At least the Moor had some evidence—the handkerchief and all that. Literally within minutes of Hermione agreeing to Leontes’s request to persuade Polixenes to stay instead of returning to his kingdom in Bohemia, he becomes half mad with jealousy. There is no motive. Shakespeare omits some incidents in his source where Bellaria and Egistus—Polixenes and Hermione in the play—meet innocently in the queen’s bedroom.

The densely textured verse gives Branagh as Leontes the basis for this descent from gracious affectionate host into madness and rage. Indeed just about everyone in this distinguished cast achieves an unaffected clarity of diction. But Branagh is extraordinary as verse speaker and actor. His face crumples into a mask of hatred as Leontes moves from one appalling demand to another. A centre-stage fireplace—more Roman than Victorian—makes his threat to burn Hermione’s newborn baby alive even more chilling. Even for those who know the play it still feels as if anything might happen as the deranged king moves from one excess to another.

Reportedly the set at the Garrick Theatre consisted of a series of proscenium arches reaching deep into the frame, each delicately lit, the whole effect quite beautiful. Unfortunately this did not register on the cameras so the images in the movie houses were muted. However, the faces of the actors were clear and perhaps the performances were enhanced by the lessening of any visual distraction. Indeed for all the Victorian/Edwardian trappings there is a universal quality about the setting that allows the viewers’ imaginations to run free even while being drawn into the drama.

We feel the predicament of Camillo, played by Branagh regular John Shrapnel, who has to choose between murdering Polixenes, as ordered by the king, and helping him escape. It was a dilemma straight out of Tudor history where men were required at their sovereign’s command to suborn perjury—Thomas Cromwell at the trials of Thomas More and Anne Boleyn, which was effectively murder, as both were executed. But for Shakespeare and his audience loyalty to an evil king still imperils a man’s soul. Camillo warns Polixenes and escapes with him.

Antigonus (Michael Pennington), who is charged with the terrible duty of exposing Hermione’s newborn babe in the wild, is similarly divided. The command is appalling but he has pledged his word, and his wife Paulina’s life will be forfeit if he disobeys. Pennington, given a simple staging by Branagh, movingly conveys the man’s anguish even as he becomes aware of the retribution that awaits him. The language is rich, with the bear that is to devour him evoked in the verse. This is the scene that concludes with the famous stage direction “Exit pursued by a bear”. After hours of peering at my facsimile First Folio and Elizabethan theatre model I could not work out how the scene was staged in Shakespeare’s theatres: real bear; man in bear suit; when does the bear enter, and so on. The first time I saw the play on stage, a gigantic silhouette was employed along with a roar. Branagh uses a projected image of a real bear with an even more authentic roar.

Hermione’s trial must have evoked memories of Catherine of Aragon’s dignified defence at the annulment hearing before the Papal Legate nearly fifty years earlier, a story the playwright may well have been considering. (His Henry VIII was played in 1613 but may have been composed earlier; The Winter’s Tale was performed in 1611.) Certainly the exchanges between Leontes and Hermione reflect Anne Boleyn’s pointed comment about Henry, that whenever the King gets into an argument with his wife he loses the argument. In the Globe and at court Shakespeare’s company would probably have made the most of the pageantry inherent in the trial of a queen. But Branagh plays down the formality of the occasion, with the “court” clad in frock-coats sitting in a semi-circle, and Hermione standing upstage as Leontes hurls his accusations at her downstage with his back to the audience.

Sir Kenneth is anything but the kind of actor-manager who directs the play around his performance. Still, the clash between the increasingly irrational king and Miranda Raison’s luminous Hermione is riveting; and yes, she does win the argument.

Since the play is set in a mythological past the king has sent to the Oracle at Delphi. Leontes is proved to have devastated his world—with Hermione and his son dead, the baby lost—and to be irrefutably wrong. We see him an anguished broken figure whose only path is atonement and repentance. Here the regal Lady Paulina, wife to Antigonus, becomes the agent of his redemption. Often Paulina can be a scold but Judi Dench takes command of the rich language Shakespeare has given her and gives it, as one critic has observed, an “elegiac quality”. The great actress has always had a distinctive voice. In her early days she would pin up a notice on her dressing room door, “I have not got a cold, this is the way I always sound”. Her voice has in later years acquired a greater range that here does full justice to the word-music in the language; never more so than when she doubles as Father Time to portray the passing of sixteen years.

Was it forty-five years ago that I saw Judi Dench double Hermione and Perdita in Trevor Nunn’s Royal Shakespeare Company production? She was an intense, indignant Hermione and a graceful, enchanting Perdita. It was a time when productions could be desperately trendy. Stage design had to make a statement and Nunn was experimenting with white boxes for the interiors and made the sheep-shearing festival of the second half all flower-children and hippies.

Branagh’s vision is more down-to-earth, with vivid colours and wild dances creating a richly suggestive fertility ritual. Tom Bateman as Florizel and Jessie Buckley as Perdita make the “old tale” romance of Leontes’s lost daughter and Polixenes’s son work far better than it deserves. Branagh has a lot of fun with Shakespeare’s trickster Autolycus (John Dalgliesh) but wisely takes us briskly through the devices that lead to the reconciliation.

When the statue of Hermione was brought to life in Nunn’s production I’m afraid many of us were distracted by how Perdita was going to become Hermione. Here the emphasis is where it should be: on the way Paulina’s words bring the statue to life. Shakespeare was triumphantly having it both ways. Has Hermione been concealed by Paulina or is it a miracle? For Branagh this does not matter. The renewal and redemption carry the day, and so they should.

As a young man Branagh left the Royal Shakespeare Company as a reaction against the kind of production I saw in 1970. Branagh believed the actors’ imaginations should replace the designer’s heavy visual statements, hence his insistence on unaffected verse-speaking and simple design.

All of which has made The Winter’s Tale a triumph. He has not denied himself music, however. The performance is accompanied by a beautiful score by his regular collaborator Patrick Doyle (who also composed for Henry V and Hamlet).

Branagh is not trying to turn a stage production into a movie. On the big screen the coverage duplicates what the spectator might see from the best seats in the house. When the Garrick Theatre opened in 1889 audiences at Sir Henry Irving’s Lyceum would see Shakespearean plays accompanied by specially composed scores played by a full orchestra. I doubt if the Branagh company’s budget goes that far but I can’t wait to see what he does with Romeo and Juliet.