The Winter’s Tale – Roman Theatre at Verulamium, St Albans

Picture: Tim Morozzo

The Winter’s Tale continues at the Roman Theatre at Verulamium, St Albans until 10 July 2021.

Star rating: three stars ★ ★ ★ ✩ ✩

Of all of Shakespeare’s plays, The Winter’s Tale is hardest to classify, beyond “the one with the stage direction Exit, pursued by a bear”, starting as psychodrama before segueing into knockabout comedy. This new open-air production led by directors Adam Nichols and Janet Podd (who also adapt the work with Sophie Swithinbank) leans so heavily into both genres that it can feel like one is watching two very different plays.

Starting in the kingdom of Sicilia, the focus is on its king Leontes (Adam Nichols) and his increasing suspicions that the hospitality his wife Hermione (Lucy Crick) is bestowing upon King Polixenes of Bohemia (Mat Betteridge) has stretched into infidelity, and the baby his pregnant wife is expecting is not his own.

Regal paranoia and obsession with children would have been familiar to Shakespeare’s contemporary audience, who had lived through Henry VIII’s reign. Here, the devastating consequences of Leontes’ descent into paranoia are borne rather more effectively by Crick as the wrongly accused wife than Nichols’ king. Her monologues during the courtroom scene bring layers of tension in the first half of a play that builds in intensity.

The mood is enhanced by a string quintet which, whether the skies are overcast or blazing sunshine, creates an effective mood of darkening grimness.

And then Antigonus escapes with Hermione’s newborn daughter, Perdita, before being shipwrecked on the shores of Bohemia. After his well-known exit (pursued, in this case, by a three-person bear puppet) the plays executes a 180° tonal shift as the baby is found by two shepherds, and descends into musical farce.

For this Bohemia is a thigh-slapping, yee-hawing land of line dancing and questionable American accents. After the interval, Emma Wright and Will Pattle’s shepherds – all blinged up thanks to the gold Antigonus left with baby Perdita – take their now-grown adopted daughter to a sheep-shearing festival hoedown, where Guido Garcia Lueches’ wily thief Autolycus, in between attempts to separate Pattle from his gold, leads proceedings in a variety of pop songs, from The Bangles to Queen (what else but a ‘Bohemian Rhapsody’).

Plot is scant here, save for Piloxenes’ donning of a poor disguise to spy on Perdita, the girl who has fallen in love with his own son Florizel. Emilia Harrild’s Perdita comes into her own here, demonstrating fine vocal and dance skills that keep the party atmosphere going.

But all good things must come to an end, and soon the girl who escaped her country as a baby is forced to flee her adopted homeland back to Sicilia, this time with a fiancé in tow, and to see her father Leontes for the first time.

The reunion between father and daughter is touching, but that is not the meeting for which The Winter’s Tale is renowned. That honour is preserved for the “resurrection” of Leontes’ Hermione, previously pronounced dead offstage, who is presented by her friend Paulina (an impressive Faith Turner) as a statue carved in her memory – only to “come to life” when it is revealed she has been alive, but in hiding, all this time.

Despite his being alone with his paranoia and grief for 16 years, Nichols’ Leontes never really feels as if he has earned the forgiveness afforded him by wife and daughter. But this production successfully melds the two worlds, austere Sicilia and raucous Bohemia, in its closing moments, leaving one with a sense of coherence that the play as a whole lacks.

Scott Matthewman