The Winter's Tale by William Shakespeare Page A

included a running brook, several trees, and a donkey. The performances of the distinguished cast—Ellen Terry as Hermione, Charles Warner as Leontes, and Maud Tree as Paulina—were overwhelmed by sets and orchestra.
    Harley Granville-Barker’s 1912 production at the Savoy Theatre revolutionized the staging of Shakespeare’s plays forever and his influence on modern production practices is still evident. 17 Critics were quick to recognize its significance:
    Mr. Barker’s production of “The Winter’s Tale” on Saturday last is probably the first performance in England of a play by Shakespeare that the author would himself have recognised for his own since Burbage—or, at any rate, Davenant—retired from active management. 18
    Yes, there is no other word for it save the word that in popular usage denotes a special kind of artistic assault on conventionalism; it is Post-Impressionist Shakespeare. 19
    Granville-Barker was influenced by the work of William Poel’s Elizabethan Stage Society, which attempted to re-create original performance conditions in his production of
Hamlet
in 1881. In New YorkNorthrop Ames directed a production of
The Winter’s Tale
in similar conditions at the New Theatre in 1910. But it was Granville-Barker’s
Winter’s Tale
that crystallized the new production style. His most telling resource was a simple thrust stage:

    2. The clean lines of modernity: Time introduces the audience to Perdita, the Old Shepherd, and Florizel in Harley Granville-Barker’s 1912 production at the Savoy Theatre.
    For the management of the action Mr. Barker has revived the Elizabethan plan with a difference. The stage has three planes, or steps, with two side-doors in the foreground, through which courtiers and messengers make their entrances and exits. There is only one interval, after the third act, to mark off the two periods of the story, and the act-drop occasionally descends upon the actors when they are speaking (this, by the way, is taken from the theatre of the Restoration), so that they begin a speech in mid-stage and finish it before the curtain. Set speeches they deliver at the very edge of the stage (there are no footlights, but search-lamps converging on the stage from thedress-circle), addressing them directly to the audience, the proper method, of course, of the old “platform.” The rustics dance and sing to pipe and tabor; there is no orchestra. 20
    Those critics who liked the production admired the performances. John Palmer called Henry Ainley’s Leontes “the finest piece of Shakespearian acting I have yet seen” and was equally enthusiastic about Lillah McCarthy’s Hermione. 21 Not everyone was convinced, however, and the production closed after six weeks: “Mr Granville Barker, in a distressful striving after the artistic, has achieved that mingling of discordant, ill-related elements, that impossible jangling of different keys, which can never be far removed from vulgarity.” 22
    Peter Brook’s 1951 production at the Phoenix Theatre achieved popular and critical success, despite continued misgivings about the play itself:
    But for all its structural shortcomings
The Winter’s Tale
has eminence, charm, of an indefinably old-fashioned kind, and Mr Peter Brook’s production discovers in it a certain strength as well. Most of this stems from Mr Gielgud’s very fine performance as Leontes, whose jealousy is so unquestionably real and terrible that we are not worried by the fact that its causes are flimsy and its consequences far-fetched. He is well partnered by Miss Diana Wynyard’s handsome and long-suffering Hermione and Miss Flora Robson’s staunch Paulina (though I am not sure that Shakespeare did not see this officious lady as a slightly more comic character than Miss Robson makes her). 23
    Brook was clearly influenced by Barker’s ideas, but theater historian Dennis Bartholomeusz