1991

The Winter’s Tale
Coriolanus
by William Shakepeare

English Shakespeare Company
Her Majesty’s, March, 1991.

Reviewed by Murray Bramwell

The English Shakespeare Company’s The War of the Roses is a hard thirty-five acts to follow – even for the English Shakespeare Company. When they visited Adelaide in 1988 the ESC was concluding a two year tour with their marathon history cycle – Richard II to Richard III with all the Henrys in between. Performed in a five day stint the production, directed by Michael Bogdanov and featuring actor Michael Pennington, stands as one of the most remarkable achievements in Shakespearian theatre in many years. For sheer energy, stamina, imagination and scale it is probably unrivalled.

The scale is important. There was a sense of exponential complexity as the seven plays roared by us over 22 hours. Narratives of honour, loyalty and courage, treason, intrigue and carnage were carried by twenty-five actors with such intelligently integrated design, costume, music and lighting that each scene, prop, characterisation and motif built on the one preceding and anticipated what was to come. Relocated in time between the 1890s and the Falklands War, the histories revealed anew Shakespeare’s sense of the fragility of mortality and the uncertainties of fortune, while deftly charting the structures of power and the grim etiquette of revenge.

In Australia again, with two works in repertory, The Winter’s Tale and Coriolanus, the ESC have lost some of their majesty. The choice of plays is quirky but that’s not the reason; a shift to two works differently rich and strange is just what is needed after the monolithic histories. The current productions, from the direction through to design and costume, lack definition. What were bold choices in the past are hesitant here, what was strikingly inventive now verges on self-parody.

There is much in their work that is still gratifying, of course, but Bogdanov, Pennington and company have so convincingly set their own bench mark that, to some extent, this time around they are their own rebuke.

The Winter’s Tale, Shakespeare second last play, is a mannerist comedy whose darkness nearly overshadows its resolution. In this the production is splendid. After a wonky prologue, the opening court scenes, in Edwardian-cum-Twenties costume, are dominated by Michael Pennington’s neurotic Leontes. A repressed hysteric in a black morning coat he looks like he could use a consult with that new man Freud. Instead he is raining spite on his blameless wife and dragging the roof down on his kingdom. Roles like this are Pennington’s forte. As with his Wildean Richard II, his Leontes is trapped in proud equivocation, one minute eaten away by certainty, in the next by doubt. The acting, like the character, is self-regarding, the speeches delivered in those livid arias with which Pennington can fill an auditorium without either bellowing or losing a skerrick of meaning. He is still breath-taking to watch.

Lynn Farleigh holds her ground as Hermione, inflecting the character’s fairytale humility with a modern forthrightness while Robert Demeger’s Camillo mediates more like a family friend in an Ayckbourn play than a figure at court. This time , with the absence of actors like Barry Stanton, Paul Brennan and Hugh Sullivan, the gap between Pennington’s high style and the suburban naturalism of other actors has become discrepant.

The shift to Bohemia begins well with Michael Cronin as Antigonus bidding farewell to Perdita and then to his mortal coil. His exit (pursued by a bear) has Leontes appear in furious black to touch Antigonus’ shoulder with a grizzly fur claw. It is a successful stroke of staging but the last of any subtlety as Act IV begins.

The rap narrator as Time is a false note, not just because Vivian Munn can’t hammer it together. In this production it is both too little and too much. In the absence of Terry Mortimer’s unifying music-scapes from the histories, the shift to the hyper-contemporary has no context. A strong idea becomes a feeble whimsy made even more remote by the literalness of the Bohemian pastoral- performed as a vignette of animal husbandry in turn-of-the-century Warwickshire.

While The Winter’s Tale is a marvellous work, the rustic scenes can be trying to modern audiences. For that reason much depends on Autolycus kick-starting the pace of the comedy- something that James Hayes’s cliched Oirish rogue fails to do. In the State Theatre Company version a few years ago, Geoffrey Rush dressed as an outlandish spiv (design by Mary Moore) made his entrance on a bicycle. It was a hectic turn of a kind that Australian comic actors have got very good at. The ESC, with their yokel humour -particularly the sheepish chorus line, verge on an archness that’s no fun at all.

The return to Leontes’ court is a return to the heart of the production. June Watson’s remonstrating Paulina, Andrew Jarvis’ gracious Polixenes and Lynn Farleigh’s presence as Hermione make the statue scene, not only plausible, but powerful, as the spell is broken and the world made new. Pennington’s Leontes, dessicated with contrition, but still prisoner of his cramped imagination, brings an emotional logic to a production in considerable stylistic disarray.

The company began preparation for Coriolanus in 1989 before the maps of Eastern Europe had to be sent back to the cartographer. Bogdanov is right to recognise that Coriolanus would resonate meaning for audiences witnessing a succession of democracy struggles in the Soviet bloc. But in adapting the work,the company open up more questions than their production can answer. It is a fascinating reading of the play, but unlike their work in the histories, the ESC seem to be at odds with their text.

For a start, Shakespeare presents a pretty shabby view of the citizenry. Whatever way you look at it, they turn out to be a changeable lot, while Coriolanus, for all his private school unpleasantness, in refusing to play the hypocrite, ends up looking like what Fred Dagg used to call a man of principle.

Bogdanov’s staging is more assured with Chris Dyer’s one-size-fits-two set making more sense for Coriolanus. The Democracy banner emblazoned above the street crowds gives effective focus as does the polyglot militaria worn by Pennington in the lead. In General McArthur leather tunic with a duelling scar running from his eye to his jawline he looks like a Connecticut Hun in the court of Mussolini. It’s a powerful composite, but unlike the specifically British reference points which give political edge to the histories, the disparate elements in this production begin to cancel each other out..

The leaders of the citizenry, Scinius (Michael Cronin) and Junius Brutus ( Robert Demeger) are played a bit like shop stewards from I’m All Right Jack. It’s unintentional, but the class biases seem to work against a progressive reading of the play. Faced with Pennington’s haughty patrician the proles don’t stand a chance. Despite effective subtext, such as women laying poppy wreaths during battle scenes and the use of the lit auditorium as speaking point for citizens at the public meetings, the play keeps tilting back to Pennington. Mugging at the crowd, contemptuously tapping his microphone before deigning to speak and then curling his iambics in disdain of common prose, it’s hard to think it’s not his play.

In highlighting the political themes the oedipal struggle between Cauis Marcius and his mother Volumnia is much diminished. June Watson rarely uses the full ferocity her lines ivite -such that Coriolanus’ fateful decision not to march on Rome becomes almost cryptic. Lynn Farleigh is spirited as his wife Virgilia, and Andrew Jarvis, expert in martial heroes by now, is compelling as Aufidius despite the Errol Flynn costuming.

There is much to admire in this production but we are reminded that Coriolanus is a different play for our times than the ESC would have. That said, with both The Winter’s Tale and Coriolanus we are privileged to see the work of our greatest playwright, imaginatively and passionately performed. Michael Pennington has said that the banner under which the company works is that of the text. This challenging season is proof that with the ESC the text is not only alive and clear but still making us think about who and what we are.

“Double Bill” The Adelaide, No.87, April, 1991, p.33.