After some of the second-rate stuff served up on this stage in the past year, it is refreshing to report that Nicholas Hytner handles the Olivier Theatre with his usual confidence. And, even if his production is infinitely stronger in the Sicilian court than the Bohemian countryside, it marks him out as a likely future director of the National.
By opting for modern dress, Hytner also anchors Leontes's jealousy in a plausible world of tortured politesse, and provides a perfect setting for a major performance from Alex Jennings as Leontes. What is startling about Jennings is the exact gradation of his decline. He starts as a modern, sweatered monarch tossing a rugby ball to his old chum, Polixenes, as if he were boy eternal.
Left to himself over coffee, he drums his fingers restlessly on an armchair and descends by rapid degrees into filthy-minded fantasist and raw-boned, red-faced paranoid convinced he is a derided cuckold. The upholstered smoothness of Ashley Martin-Davis's setting, with its elegantly sliding screens, somehow makes his insane jealousy all the more shocking.
What Jennings brings out as well as any Leontes I have seen is the depth of the character's shame. After the death of his son Mamillius, he rocks silently back and forth as if his top-heavy body were possessed by grief. When he says of Camillo, whom he has urged to poison Polixenes, "how he glisters through my rust", it is a cry of profound mortification. And, at the play's end, as Claire Skinner's marble-still Hermione is restored to life, Jennings mixes silent astonishment with a retrospective guilt. This is a fine performance that pierces straight to the heart.
Hytner stages the Sicilian scenes with a cool clarity that turns Hermione's public indictment into a show trial and gives life to characters such as Deborah Findlay's Paulina - who becomes a stylish nag in chic clothing. But the production goes oddly adrift in the rural revels. They are staged as a Bohemian Glastonbury complete with beaded New Agers and ostentatiously smoked joints. It does little for the nature versus nurture debate, turns Phil Daniels's Autolycus into a misplaced Artful Dodger and completely swamps the not very beguiling Florizel and Perdita.
In the end, this fable of reconciliation wins through. But rarely has it been such a relief to get back to Sicilia. In Hytner's hands, this becomes a fairytale rooted in a real world. When Jennings's Leontes gazes at the marmoreal Hermione and asks, "What fine chisel could ever yet cut breath?" we share his sense of wonderment.
In rep. Box office: 020-7452 3000. A version of this review appeared in later editions of yesterday's paper.
