The Winter’s Tale is a fantastically weird little play – it starts out as an Elizabethan revenge tragedy, mutates into a charming pastoral comedy, and ends up being a tearjerking story about miraculous second chances. The Hampstead Players’ summer production not only delivered each of these elements in spades, but actually got the three to play together nicely.
The play centres on King Leontes, whose jealousy over the imagined love affair between his wife, Hermione, and his best friend, King Polixenes, ends up killing Leontes’s wife and son, and leads him to strand his baby daughter in the wilderness. Adam Sutcliffe’s Leontes made a high-octane, realistically tortured contrast to David Gardner’s thoroughly likeable King Polixenes; Gaynor Bassey brought out Hermione’s sweetness, but also gave her a gravity and strength that rendered her downfall heartbreaking. However, the real emotional heart of the play is Paulina, Hermione’s best friend and defender, whose husband ends up dying while reluctantly carrying out Leontes’s revenge. Moragh Gee played Paulina as an indomitable Englishwoman of Imperial vintage, but also portrayed the character’s pain with quiet eloquence. Said Abdallah, meanwhile, played her husband as such a salt-of-the-earth, genuinely conflicted good guy that his death was wrenching. Rounding out the key players in Leontes’s Variety Show of Crazy is Camillo, a sympathetic nobleman of somewhat negotiable loyalties. Adrian Hughes not only gave a beautifully nuanced performance, but had solid chemistry with both of the kings Camillo flits between.
I’m always amazed by the Hampstead Players’ ability to craft fully-fledged, memorable supporting characters, and this was no exception: Sean Howey, John Dansey, Stephen Clarke, and Harlequin made a varied and interesting cast of scheming noblemen, while Judy Burgess was a gentle foil to the incisive Paulina, and Cliff Burgess made his bit parts vibrant and fun. Most of all, Matthew Gardner, making his theatrical debut as Leontes’s son, turned in a savvy, funny, and wonderfully sweet performance. His scenes with Rosy Pendlebury’s wickedly lively lady-in-waiting were adorable.
About halfway through, the play shifts from Leontes’s court, where the king’s jealousy has shattered numerous innocent lives, to Polixenes’s idyllic pastoral kingdom. Where the first two characters we meet are looting a dead guy’s stuff and making jokes about his being eaten by a bear, so possibly the tone of the play hasn’t changed all that much. Nevertheless, the Players really made the countryside comedy feel like a breath of fresh air, especially after the production’s success in evoking the suffocating terror of Leontes’s rule. The transition is handled by the personification of Time, and Patrice Dorling was spectacular in that role, rocking an Aztec fusion ensemble and making a grave, mythic character surprisingly engaging.
Here, it turns out that Polixenes’s (now grown) son, played by Simon Murray, has fallen in love with a shepherdess, Perdita (Annie Hughes), who, in a Shocking Twist, turns out to be Leontes’s abandoned daughter. I have to give Murray and Hughes a lot of credit here: their young lovers came across as charming, but sassy and grounded, and they really got the audience rooting for them. Meanwhile, Matthew Williams stole the show as Autolycus, a hilarious rogue with a rakish grin who was like something out of the Elizabethan version of Hustle, and who provided the perfect counterpoint to Edward Smith’s sly, subtle take on Perdita’s buffoonish adopted brother. Simon Malpas was bawdy comedy gold as Perdita’s foster father.
Eventually, of course, all of this comes out, Perdita is reunited with her repentant father, and the two kings reconcile – and, in a strange moment of magical realism, it turns out that Hermione hasn’t been dead all these years! The mother-daughter reunion got me choked up (especially thanks to Annie Hughes’s reactions), but what I really loved about the ending of the Players’ version was the stark sense of loss alongside the joy. After all, Leontes can’t bring back his son, or Paulina’s husband, or the twenty lost years; he’s always going to be paying for those, even in a world where victims lay decades-long plots, not for revenge, but for redemption. It’s a complicated ending, and the Players let it be complicated.
Lush aristocratic costumes with subtle Mediterranean touches and some excellent choices in lighting and music really helped bring the story to life. Ultimately, the Hampstead Players delivered a Winter’s Tale that was vivacious and charming, but deliciously dark in all the right ways.
Review: The Winter’s Tale
Catherine Martin