The Winter's Tale by William Shakespeare Page B

concludes that while “Barker was very much in play” in terms of the simple set and fluid performance style, “Barker’s other important principle of intimacy, dictated by the thrust-stage, was not a part of Brook’s design. The production was not as radical in its sweep as Granville-Barker’s, nor quite as original.” 24
    In recent years the play has regained some of its early popularity,and those issues that rendered it problematic for theater audiences attuned to a realist mode of representation seem less daunting to those willing to suspend their disbelief and, as required by Paulina, to awake their poetic and theatrical faith. Most recent productions have nevertheless been performed under the aegis of the subsidized theaters such as the Royal Shakespeare Company and the Royal National Theatre. RSC productions are discussed in detail below, while the most significant production at the National has been Nicholas Hytner’s modern dress version in 2001 with Alex Jennings as Leontes, Claire Skinner as Hermione, and Deborah Findlay as Paulina. A play as ever of two halves, it had critics mixed in their views as to which worked better. Most were impressed by Hytner’s inventive updating: “His contrasting versions of contemporary life suggest Establishment and drop-out, old order and New Age, Windsor and Spencer.” 25 Sicilia became a “sleek monochrome box … peopled by sycophants in grey suits,” while “Bohemia is an explosion of colour: Glastonbury-cum-Woodstock, with no morris-dance romping or unfunny clowns, no yokels and no wenches.” 26 All were agreed that “Findlay, always subtle and always substantial, gives the outstanding performance of the production: she’s never a shrew or simply a visionary.” 27 The part of Paulina has again and again proved to be one of the most rewarding female roles in Shakespeare.
    Perhaps the most admired production of modern times was that of Annabel Arden for Simon McBurney’s Complicite company, who specialize in vivid storytelling through highly physical theater. The production opened in January 1992 at the Seymour Theatre Centre, Sydney, then was played in Hong Kong and toured the UK before a run at London’s Lyric Hammersmith.
Daily Telegraph
critic Charles Spencer caught its dazzling quality in a suitably effervescent review:
    Complicite’s use of movement and body language brilliantly illuminates the text, and almost every scene has a vitality that forces you to consider the play afresh.
    The play begins with disco music, popping champagne corks and manic games of blind-man’s-buff, yet it quickly becomes clear that the party spirit is not shared by Leontes.Simon McBurney brings a fidgety, sweaty intensity to the role of the troubled king, and in one superb scene he is discovered standing on top of a wardrobe, gazing miserably down on the happy innocents beneath him as his heart is gnawed by destructive jealousy.
    Annabel Arden’s production captures harrowingly the full trauma of the first half of the play, as Leontes creates a winter world of death and despair. The physical and emotional violence McBurney brings to the tormented king as he rages among the toys in his young son’s nursery has the sickening impact of a kick in the solar plexus.
    In the second half Complicite let their hair down in their own inimitable way. The scenes in Bohemia have an infectious, anarchic energy, with a vintage comic performance from Marcello Magni as that normally tedious rogue Autolycus. Jettisoning Shakespeare, and talking in a ludicrous mixture of Italian and heavily accented English, he comes on as a hilarious parody of a libidinous Latin, pinching handbags from the audience, flogging dodgy cassette tapes and offering healing laughter after all the grief of the earlier acts.
    In a haunting, slow-motion procession with the nine-strong cast changing into costumes of mourning as they march, the