Compass is the UK's most consistently inventive exponent of classical theatre on an intimate scale, and artistic director Neil Sissons is a master at making big plays function with a skeleton cast. It is no easy task to keep Shakespeare ticking over with a core troupe of eight actors, and occasionally the company is foiled by the impossibility of the arithmetic. Yet here is a play whose functionality is not hampered but improved by a bit of judicious doubling.
The Winter's Tale can seem a broken-backed beast - a chilling study of tyrannical psychosis spliced with frolicking bucolics. Leontes is a role incorporating a very long sit in the dressing room, while the chief animus of the bohemian scenes, the amoral pedlar Autolycus, is spectacularly redundant to the plot.
Compass's solution is to weld the parts together. Leontes and Autolycus are not usually doubled, yet here the pairing is made to seem obvious. Leontes is one of Shakespeare's most monochromatic central figures; Autolycus is an inexplicable riot of local colour. Put the two together and you have the divided halves of a complete personality.
Peter Lindford carries off this dual undertaking with effortless charisma. As Leontes, he is a dangerously unpredictable tyrant in a dinner suit, who at one point frenziedly swings his newborn daughter from a balcony in a Jackson-inspired display of childcare. As Autolycus, he is a tattered, flat-footed vaudevillian - the satyr alternative to Leontes's icy repression. Similarly, each member of the cold Sicilian court finds his or her sunnier alter ego, with the result that Sissons's production opens up a huge well of redemption in the final scene, when the two worlds come together.
The concept is well served by excellent acting, particularly from the feminine trio of Rachel Edwards's meltingly innocent Perdita, Gilian Cally's stoic Paulina and Beatrice Comins's dignified Hermione. The entire cast impress both as whooping shepherds and stooping courtiers - convincing proof that sometimes it is better to do things by halves.
· At The Theatre, Chipping Norton, February 25 and 26. Box office: 01608 642350. Then touring.
