"A sad tale's best for winter," says the boy Mamilius; and, possibly because of the season of the year, I became unusually aware of the fairytale elements in Shakespeare's play while watching David Farr's impressive Stratford transfer. We are ushered into a world of cruel kings, wronged children and miraculously reunited families that seems to anticipate the Brothers Grimm.
The strength of Farr's production, however, remains its picture of the Sicilian court dissoloving into chaos through Leontes's insane jealousy. Greg Hicks, lean and quivering, is excellent as a king in the grip of a paranoid delusion. You see the extent of his madness in the way he seizes on Camillo's innocent use of the word "satisfy" as confirmation of his wife's adultery. Kelly Hunter is also superb as the falsely accused Hermione: full of fire and defiance at her trial, yet finally displaying a loving forgiveness of her crazed husband in true fairytale style.
As so often, it's the rural Bohemian scenes that prove a tougher nut to crack: partly because not enough attention is paid to the nature versus nurture debate, partly because a satyr's dance conducted by book-swathed figures brandishing prop phalluses hardly conjures up the Dionysiac spirit. But at least Brian Doherty makes a suitably predatory, unsentimental Autolycus, and Darell D'Silva reminds us that Polixenes in his intemperate rage is every bit as tyrannical as Leontes. It's a relief, however, to return to the court where Sam Troughton describes the off-stage father-daughter reunion with true awe and where the resurrection of Hermione, arguably the most moving moment in all Shakespeare, takes us back into the world of magic and myth.
