January 17, 1998: Shakespeare, Cymbeline
Royal Shakespeare Company, Barbican Theatre
I think this theatre has become notorious for its poor acoustics. It positively eats consonants, with the result that you don’t really get more than fifty or sixty percent of what the actors are saying and have to fill in the rest by imagination or from memory.
Cymbeline may simply be one of those plays that is best revived only infrequently. This is the second production of it that we’ve seen inside of two months — the earlier one being by Hartford Stage (HS). Both productions adopt a kind of fantastic Orientalism, though in HS the expression of it is in shimmering, multicolored silks, pillbox hats, and so on, whereas the RSC is spare, white tunics, à la japonisme, open fires in overturned shallow cylindrical black cones, beds and cushions on floors, and such. Each production embraced some idea of the exotic along with the fantastic; never mind that Cymbeline is King of Britain. Caesar’s emissaries, in the RSC production, wear flowing blood-red gowns; the swords of all are slightly curved and slender; they could be used equally well in some next production of The Arabian Nights or Invasion of the Tartars.
As for “concept,” the RSC designers seem to have taken inspiration from an aphorism spoken late in the play: “Fortune brings in some boats that are not steered.” That is, there is a nautical metaphor, an image of a gigantic sail, imposed on the entire course of proceedings. It fills the entire stage. In the opening sequence — always an embarrassment to a director (like the opening of A Winter’s Tale) who sees an introductory expository scene between 1 Gentleman and 2 Gentleman as inherently boring and therefore as something that must be dramatized — the great white cloth lies flat, covering almost the entire stage floor; on it are seated a soothsayer, his own portable smoking lamp before him, who tells us what we need to know to follow the action, and all the other characters of the play, who stand and identify themselves as their names are mentioned and even join in the narration. The cloth is then cleared and, almost miraculously, it rises on a batten and takes on the optimistic curve and fullness of a sail under full wind. And so we sail on into our story. The “sail” is in fact a wonderfully supple and flexible device; it even has a vertical slit in it to do duty, later in the play when Imogen has arrived in the vicinity of Milford Haven, as the cave where the banished Belarius has hidden and brought up to maturity the two sons of Cymbeline, Guidarius and Arviragus, whom he stole away in retribution for his banishment. The result is a swiftly moving action, with one point of egress set at the end of a long white path out into the auditorium itself. This had the effect of forcing the action out much closer to the audience than it might otherwise have come, and compensating for the inherent limitations of use of the sail-curtain.
On the one hand, I liked all t