Stefanie C Peters

I have been hearing that the issue with this summer’s RSC repertoire is that the new ensemble, just come together for a three-year contract in the tradition of the RSC, has not yet understood how to project their voices in the Courtyard Theatre and enunciate so as to be heard. Since April, however, when these premiered, much progress has evidently been made.

Greg Hicks as Leontes, king of Sicilia, plunges terrifying quickly into jealousy in the fear that his wife Hermione, played by Kelly Hunter, is unfaithful to him with Darrel D’Silva’s Polixenes, King of Bohemia and Leontes’ childhood friend. Any fear that perhaps the switch from trust to suspicion was too quick is quickly forgotten in Hicks’ powerful portrayal of groundless fear. Hicks carries the play, helped by strong performances from Hunter as a spotlessly loyal and stately Hermione, Brian Doherty as a wonderfully funny (and smelly) Autolycus, and Noma Dumezweni as a noble Paulina.

Perdita, played by Samantha Young, was queen over the Bohemian, Arcadian festival before her entrance was called for: she entered hanging from a tree that was lowered down onto the stage, where Tunji Kasim as a very eager young Prince Florizel found her. She was the hardest of the actors to hear and played Perdita much more as a country belle than a royal lady placed in a forest; her Perdita seemed somewhat uncomfortable in her costume change in the last act. The young couple did not command sympathy as much as the elder generation.

I couldn’t help liking Dumezweni as Paulina, even though the last scene was played much differently than I expected or wished. Paulina’s protestations were hurried, frantic, as if she was hiding something, as if she didn’t want Leontes to be reunited with Hermione, as if Hermione were captive in some sort of voodoo magic, and instead of Leontes’ conscience Paulina were a kind of worser spirit. There was a humor in her franticness that was perhaps unneeded. Nevertheless the reuniting was touching as Hermione and Leontes wordlessly embraced; touching, looking, slowly, only slowly believing they were together again, and an increase of joy when Hermione turns to see her daughter.

The scenery captured the artfulness of the play. It opened with a Christmas party, complete with crackers, laid on a long table framed by two twenty-foot tall bookcases filled with blue books. When, just before intermission, Leontes’ jealousy destroyed all that was good in his kingdom, the bookcases crashed around him, the books tumbling out onto the stage and pages fluttering around his head in a suitably painful (especially for bibliophiles in the audience) image of Leontes’ new barren life, robbed of wife, of heirs. The books became first snow drifts in the cold waste of Bohemia, then leaves in the Bohemian forest, then the barren waste of Sicilia in the last act. Books too formed the body of the enormous bear puppet that consumed Antigonus; art in this production was capable of both devastation and of healing.

I haven’t seen As You Like It yet, but I am willing to bet that The Winter’s Tale is the strongest of the plays currently in repertoire at The Courtyard Theatre. Go see it; it was delightful.