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by William Shakespeare, directed by Estelle Shook

Canadian Stage, High Park Amphitheatre, Toronto

June 30-September 4, 2011

For the first time in its 29 years, the Canadian Stage Dream in High Park is presenting The Winter’s Tale, the play Shakespeare wrote just before his more frequently performed play The Tempest.  Like the later play, The Winter’s Tale is one of the plays Northrop Frye classified as not as a comedy or tragedy, but as a “romance” because its resolution comes about not through earthly but supernatural forces.  Frye liked The Winter’s Tale because it so clearly demonstrated these differences of genre in its structure.  The first three acts form a tragedy as devoid of humour as Othello; the fourth act, introduced by the allegorical figure of Time, is a comedy; and the fifth, in which a statue comes to life, rises to the realm of romance.  One of many flaws in Estelle Shook’s direction is not making this pattern of successive genres clear.

In the first three acts Leontes, King of Sicilia, is suddenly seized with a fit of jealousy that causes him to accuse his wife Hermione and best friend Polixenes of adultery and treason and to pronounce the baby Hermione bears a bastard to be exposed and left to die.  There is nothing funny here, yet the opening night audience, more familiar with Shakespeare’s comedies, assumed that Leontes’ sudden change and reference to cuckoldry were meant to be funny.  Only when Leontes strikes Hermione and has her taken to prison did it begin to dawn on the audience that laughter was not, perhaps, the appropriate response to what was happening on stage. 

While unfamiliarity with the play is partly to blame plus misleading remarks by a local politician that the play was a “romantic comedy”, it is the director’s responsibility to help guide the audience’s response, especially in a lesser-known work.  Director Estelle Shook did not aid matters by having Leontes address some of his remarks about cuckoldry directly to members of the audience as if they were intended as comic.  Turning Hermione’s gaol guard into a comic figure is also a mistake.  Characterizing Paulina, Hermione’s chief defender, as a termagant rather than a justly outraged woman, lessens the import of what she says.  And having the infant Perdita cry at significant moments in Act 3 is so corny it arouses more amusement than pity or fear.

Further damaging the play are extensive cuts in the text so that the five-act work lasts only 100 minutes without an intermission.  Basically, Shook gives us the story but none of the reflection on it.  In Act 4 she cuts Polixenes‘ important speech about flower hybridization which is one of Shakespeare’s most important statements on the relation of art to nature.  In Act 5 she cuts so much of the dialogue between Leontes and Paulina that a first-time viewer would not realize that under Paulina’s guidance Leontes has been doing penance for the rashness of his actions for the past 16 years.  The speech of Time is central to understanding the larger meaning of the play, but Shook allows the music accompanying the speech to drown so much of it out that all we understand is that 16 years have passed between Acts 3 and 4. 

Shook has cleverly devised a way for only twelve actors to perform the play, though the cast is sadly uneven.  David Jansen is an excellent Leontes.  Unlike Ben Carlson in last year’s production at Stratford, Jansen presents Leontes’ fit of jealousy as the onset of a disease just as the text states it is.  He makes Leontes‘ loss of self-control seem as unpleasant and perplexing to Leontes as it is to the rest of the court.  When the fit finally ends with the announcement of two deaths, Jansen’s make us feel as if Leontes’s fever has broken only to open his eyes to the devastation he has caused. 

Kelly McIntosh portrays Hermione as an positive, outgoing woman, whose natural friendliness could be misunderstood by someone who didn’t know her.  She rises to nobility of spirit in the trial scene and doubtless would be quite moving in the final transformation scene if Shook had staged it with more sensitivity.  Under Shook’s direction, Nicole Robert captures only the shrewish side of Paulina in the first three acts much to the play’s detriment.  When we meet her again as the solemn keeper of Hermione’s statue, we see that Robert does have it in her to have provided a more complex portrait of the important character.  To have Robert also play Time shows that Shook does know that both characters are healing figures, but to obscure any of Time’s incisive remarks is a major error.

Sanjay Talwar is a very credible Polixenes and Jovanni Sy is especially good as Leontes’ trusted counsellor Camillo, whom the mad Leontes also declares a traitor.  George Masswohl and Sean Dixon are so funny as the Old Shepherd and the Clown that it’s a pity so many of their lines are cut.  Thomas Olajide as a well-spoken Florizel suffers the same fate.  John Blackwood is the first Antigonus I’ve seen to garner no sympathy for his grizzly fate, though he is funny as an unusually decrepit Autolycus.  It’s fine that Shook has cut some of Autolycus’ songs since Blackwood’s gravelly voice is much more suitable to blues than Renaissance ballads.          

Jasmine Chen tries so hard to make Mamillius enthusiastic that most of what she says in incomprehensible.  Luckily, as Perdita she’s able to covey the sense of the few lines left her.  Meilie Ng’s Dorcas is similarly difficult to understand, while her Gentlewoman is perfectly clear.  Charlotte Gowdy is the only one of the women with multiple roles, four in all, to create a positive and distinct impression in each one.                 

Normally, music is one of the pleasures of Shakespeare’s plays.  Here it is not.  Peter Millard’s music is neither as mysterious as it should be for the transformation scene nor as joyous as it should be for the festival of Act 4.  It doesn’t help that it is also so tentatively performed.  To have the play begin with a group processing to the stage singing “Dum dum dum” is really a dumb idea and hardly augurs well for the evening.  Why not at least set some of Shakespeare’s words to music?  Besides all this, the volume of the music is so loud that it drowns out whatever speeches it is meant to accompany. 

As one of Shakespeare’s most profound yet most accessible meditations on art, The Winter’s Tale is a play that should be a regular part of the Dream in High Park, but it should be allowed to breathe to make its full effect rather than being cut to the bone and rushed along.  It is pity to see so many good actors trapped in a production that does allow their characters their full scope.  Let’s hope a more sensitive production comes along sometime in the future.   

©Christopher Hoile

Note: This review is a Stage Door exclusive.

Photo: Kelly McIntosh and David Jansen. ©2011 Chris Gallow.

For Tickets, visit www.canadianstage.com.