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I'd never seen Cymbeline before, so in a spirit of see every Shakespeare play at least once, I was clearly going to go the the RSC to see a performance. Even better there was a Shakespeare Unwrapped session in the morning (£5 ticket for an hour of introduction into an aspect of the play, including some of the actors - highly recommended.) On this occasion the assistant director talked about some of the decisions they made when producing what isn't a frequently performed play, with the two actors showing how this applied to their parts - in fact they were both understudies for two of the main roles, so they were illustrating these. It was very interesting and boded well for the afternoon.
Cymbeline is a very strange play (stop here if you don't want plot spoilers) - a bit like fanfic which has tried to jam all the plots into one fic. I was quite disappointed at the absence of twins, which I think was the only plot Shakespeare left out. The Romans landed at Milford Haven, suitable for when the future Henry VII landed in Wales, but not the Romans. So any production has quite a lot to surmount.
And unfortunately this one didn't seem to manage it. I found out, reading the programme afterwards, it was set in some dystopian Britain of the relatively near future, which was a surprise, since it appeared to me to be some indistinct past (which would have been fine). There were a number of gender swaps, which worked - Cymbeline became a queen (think Boudicca), which wasn't a problem, but she didn't come over as either angry or war-like. Her second husband, the duke, had turned into a pantomime villain at his last appearance. I'd seen a good number of the cast in Hamlet earlier in the season, but for whatever reason they didn't seem to have the power they'd had in the earlier play. Best, for me, was Marcus Griffiths, who played Cloten (and even then not particularly convincingly), who was Laertes in Hamlet.
It was another performance where the use of video didn't really work, and in fact was distracting. Also, for some reason, some of the dialogue was in Italian, French or Latin, with the original words projected onto the side screens, which turned the attention from the actors to the screens.
I'm not sure whether it was the play or the direction which was the problem, probably a bit of both, but either way, not a play to write home about.
Cymbeline is a very strange play (stop here if you don't want plot spoilers) - a bit like fanfic which has tried to jam all the plots into one fic. I was quite disappointed at the absence of twins, which I think was the only plot Shakespeare left out. The Romans landed at Milford Haven, suitable for when the future Henry VII landed in Wales, but not the Romans. So any production has quite a lot to surmount.
And unfortunately this one didn't seem to manage it. I found out, reading the programme afterwards, it was set in some dystopian Britain of the relatively near future, which was a surprise, since it appeared to me to be some indistinct past (which would have been fine). There were a number of gender swaps, which worked - Cymbeline became a queen (think Boudicca), which wasn't a problem, but she didn't come over as either angry or war-like. Her second husband, the duke, had turned into a pantomime villain at his last appearance. I'd seen a good number of the cast in Hamlet earlier in the season, but for whatever reason they didn't seem to have the power they'd had in the earlier play. Best, for me, was Marcus Griffiths, who played Cloten (and even then not particularly convincingly), who was Laertes in Hamlet.
It was another performance where the use of video didn't really work, and in fact was distracting. Also, for some reason, some of the dialogue was in Italian, French or Latin, with the original words projected onto the side screens, which turned the attention from the actors to the screens.
I'm not sure whether it was the play or the direction which was the problem, probably a bit of both, but either way, not a play to write home about.
