It is time, as James Agate used to say, to cut the cackle and come to the 'osses: to discuss, in other words, the productions rather than the policy of the RSC. But Matthew Warchus's Winter's Tale, which opens a season of Shakespeare's late plays at the renovated Roundhouse, is a weird affair that reveals little about the company's current status or future direction - unless, that is, its American setting symbolises the desire to open up the transatlantic market.
Clearly Warchus wants us to see The Winter's Tale in cinematic terms: the first half as 1940s film noir, the second as an evocation of a Coen brothers rural Appalachia. But the use of an American setting instantly raises problems. The first, since all but three of the cast are British, is that the whole thing feels inauthentic. Even more seriously, this is a play full of the most intricate, knotty, compacted language. But here you have a cast struggling not only with a variety of American accents but with a circular space and an unfamiliar acoustic. Time and again, the first half of a line registers clearly while the second is lost in an aural blur.
I also fail to see the relevance of such a setting to the play. Warchus begins with Leontes throwing a lavish wingding for Polixenes and with Hermione disappearing from a suspended cabinet in a David Copperfield-style magic act. You get the idea: Leontes, being Sicilian, is a modern Mafia hood and Hermione's vanishing act foretells her 16 years seclusion. But the moment a white-tuxedoed Polixenes steps up to the microphone and says "Nine changes of the watery star hath been/ The shepherd's note since we have left our throne/ Without a burden" the suspense is broken. Is this really how they talk in Brooklyn? And the invocation of the moon, pastoral simplicity and kingship indicates the yawning gulf between the chosen setting and the actual text.
Warchus's staging is, however, technically ingenious. He gives us a moment of pure terror when Douglas Hodge as Leontes hurls the infant Perdita from a high balcony, and later we have a predatory bear and even an arrow-swift hawk that bisects the theatre.
But ultimately this is a magical fable about forgiveness and renewal rather than a movie script, and there is something wrong with a Winter's Tale in which a close-up of a ringing telephone registers more strongly than a line like Leontes's: "I am a feather for each wind that blows."
Within the confining concept, Hodge is a powerful, bald, Brandoesque Leontes, Anastasia Hille a touchingly wronged Hermione, and there is lively support from Lauren Ward as a pleasing Perdita and Felix Dexter as a pilfering Autolycus. But this is less an evening about acting than a celebration of cinematic values. I just wish Warchus had tried to match Shakespeare's complex consciousness instead of treating him as a putative Hollywood hack.
In rep until June 19. Box office: 0870 609 1110.
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