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by William Shakespeare, directed by Antoni Cimolino

Stratford Festival, Tom Patterson Theatre, Stratford

May 30-Septemer 27, 2025

Polixenes: “This is an art

Which does mend nature, change it rather, but

The art itself is nature”

For anyone planning to see Shakespeare at the Stratford Festival, there is one clear choice. The Winter’s Tale may not be Shakespeare’s best-known play, but it is a marvellous work and one that provides the greatest insight into the patterns of the Bard’s thinking. The current production is deeply considered and features a wide array of excellent performances. Stratford last staged the play in 2010, so when it appears in as fine a production as this, no theatre-lover should miss it.

I provided a long introduction to the play when I reviewed it at Stratford in 2010 and the best I can do is to reproduce it here. “The Winter’s Tale was a great favourite of Canada’s venerated critic Northrop Frye. Of the 40 plays now attributed to Shakespeare, Frye always chose it as one of the ten he would teach in his legendary undergraduate introduction to Shakespeare. The reason why is that The Winter’s Tale demonstrates better than any other play by Shakespeare Frye’s theory of literature that relates literary genre to the four seasons – satire to winter, comedy to spring, romance to summer, and irony to winter. The first three acts of The Winter’s Tale exhibit all the main characteristics of satire – not the snide criticism you make think – but rather darkness, dissolution, the return of chaos and the defeat of the hero. The fourth act exemplifies spring with its character of rebirth and the fifth, summer and a movement beyond happiness into the miraculous. Furthermore, this cycle of seasons and genres is controlled by time, who appears as a character in the play.

“As in so many of his plays, Shakespeare confronts us with two contrasting worlds. In the Henry IV plays it is the court versus the tavern, in As You Like It the court versus the forest, in King Lear the world inside of castles versus the world out on the heath. In The Winter’s Tale we have the strict, colourless world of Sicilia versus the wild, colourful world of Bohemia. Leontes, King of Sicilia, and Polixenes, King of Bohemia, were childhood friends until fate called them to their respective duties as heads of state. Polixenes, who has been visiting Leontes, says he must leave. Leontes, wishing him to prolong his stay by even a week, asks his wife Hermione to entreat Polixenes. When Polixenes gives in and agrees to stay, Hermione’s success sets off a fit of madness in Leontes, that Shakespeare compares to an infection or disease, which suddenly afflicts Leontes with acute jealousy and paranoia. It is a crisis of faith in the most general sense. He believes his wife has been untrue to him with Polixenes, that the child she carries is his, and that his trusted servant Camillo is in league with them. When the oracle at Delphi confirms that all his suspicions are unfounded, he even withdraws his belief in the oracle, whereupon his son Mamillius and Hermione both die. Only then, now that his society has collapsed in chaos, does Leontes collapse in grief – all this before the third act has ended.

“Before the end, we see how Antigonus, a member of Leontes’ court, takes the infant Perdita, the child Hermione bore before her death, and exposes it to the elements as he promised Leontes. Antigonus has chosen Bohemia as the place to leave Perdita based on Leontes’ suspicions of her parentage. There, however, she is found by two shepherds who raise her for sixteen years when she catches the eye of Polixenes’ son Florizel, who plans to marry her despite his father’s opposition to the match because of the girl’s supposedly low origins. For those who do not know the play’s magical conclusion, I will not spoil it. And if you don’t know the play and plan to see it, I suggest you don’t spoil it for yourselves because it concludes with a scene unlike anything else in Shakespeare”.

Cimolino sets his mark upon the present production by setting the action within a frame. Normally, the allegorical figure of Time appears only in Act 4, Scene 1. In this production Cimolino has Time also appear both at the beginning and end of the play. At the beginning, Mamillius quotes the words he will later say to Hermione in Act 2, Scene 1: “A sad tale’s best for winter”. Since he says these words to Time, the suggestion is that the entire play is Mamillius’ story. The main problem with this idea is that the pre-adolescent boy would have to know about adultery and bastardy and about Leontes’ jealous notions of Hermione and Polixenes “kissing with inside lip”. In this production he would also have to know about satyr plays and dancers with giant phalluses.

While that is unlikely, the appearance of Mamillius with Time at the end after all the happy greetings of long-separated people reminds us that the boy remains a sacrifice to Leontes’ jealousy even after it has dissipated. The exclusion of someone from a happy ending is a characteristic of Shakespeare that we see in the departures of Jacques in As You Like It or Malvolio in Twelfth Night and in the death of the Boy in Henry V.

Other than this frame, Cimolino stages the play in a familiar way. Designer Francesca Callow clothes all the people of Sicilia in late Roman-style garb of black and grey with an occasional dark red while lighting designer Michael Walton creates a gloomy atmosphere of shadowy spaces. In Bohemia, in contrast, all wear peasant-like shifts in earthy colours while Walton bathes all in the soft brightness of a spring day.

While Cimolino imposes tight direction and an unrelenting pace on the emotional scenes in Sicilia, he allows the scene in Bohemia to become a bit too lax and adds elements that do not appear in the text. These include songs sung by the entire ensemble and the satyr dance of “four hairy couples”. The trick with the Bohemian scenes is to keep the pace going since, indeed, all is not happy and languid and ends with Perdita, Florizel and Camillo fleeing the wrath of Polixenes.

Cimolino’s cast especially for the scenes in Sicilia, is particularly strong. Graham Abbey gives one of his best-ever performances as Leontes. Abbey directed the play for his Groundlings Theatre Company in 2016 and has a deep knowledge of his character and gives the most nuanced performance of Leontes I have ever seen. He demonstrates how Polixenes’ decision to stay in Sicilia after Hermione persuades him triggers Leontes’ fit of jealousy. The fit starts as a sign of Leontes’ own feelings of inadequacy but then flips into an accusation against Hermione and then Polixenes. Abbey has Leontes laugh at each new fantasy his mind conjures up as if he can’t believe what he is thinking. Soon enough the laughing stops and Abbey has Leontes make increasingly vile, absurd accusations as if Leontes were possessed.

Leontes’ rejection of the oracle’s statements and the deaths of Mamillius and Hermione suddenly wake him from his fit and Abbey chillingly depicts the depths of despair and self-hatred into which Leontes falls. Unlike in some productions, Abbey illustrates through voice and movement how Leontes has aged when we next see him 16 years later.

Sara Topham is a luminous Hermione. In Hermione’s great speech at her trial before Leontes, Topham brings out in measured tones the complex mixture of pain, outrage, love and incomprehension in her response to her husband’s actions. In the final scene, Topham depicts Hermione’s awakening with such grace that she indeed makes the intended effect appear miraculous.

It is a so good to see Yanna McIntosh on the Stratford stage again. She played Hermione back in 2010 and now gives an ideal performance as Paulina. McIntosh does not make Paulina as termagant as she is sometimes portrayed but a powerful woman who uses all approaches she can think of, logical and emotional, to cure Leontes of the disease she knows has overtaken him. McIntosh finds an aspect to Paulina I have not seen before, namely the pain she feels in having to speak to Leontes with such harshness and the pity she feels for his illness. Giving Paulina more complex motives for castigating Leontes makes the character a more rounded figure and makes her willingness to care for the afflicted Leontes over 16 years much more believable.

André Sills’s Polixenes is a congenial, kind-hearted fellow, who is just as subject to sudden anger as is Leontes when he sees that his son Florizel plans to marry a lowly shepherdess. Tom Rooney is a dutiful counsellor as Camillo, first to Leontes, then to Polixenes. Without saying a word, Rooney shows Camillo’s mind working on a way out after outrageous commands from each of the two kings.

Geraint Wyn Davies is the first actor I’ve seen who has best portrayed the slippery figure of Autolycus. The character is named for the son of Hermes, a god who not only is the gods’ messenger in Greek mythology, but also its chief trickster figure. Hermes’s son is a master thief. Just as Paulina is the main force for truth in Sicilia, Autolycus is the main force for deceit in Bohemia. Wyn Davies gives Autolycus a Falstaffian nature which makes us laugh at Autolycus’ utter shamelessness.

David Collins is such a sympathetic Antigonus we feel sad that he should meet his demise so soon. Tom McCamus and Christo Graham play the Old Shepherd and Young Shepherd. McCamus wrings humour from the Old Shepherd’s wry remarks, but Graham takes his character over the top with too much shouting and wild gesticulating. In the important speech where the Young Shepherd sees both a shipwreck and a bear lunching on a man, Graham shouts so much most of his words are incomprehensible.

The same difficulty afflicts the Perdita of Marissa Orjalo and the Florizel of Austin Eckert. Both express their characters’ enthusiasm through increased volume but are unable to make sense of their lines on a word by word basis.

Other actors have made Time into a wise, amusing figure who combines supreme power with a sense of whimsy. Lucy Peacock does not attempt to give Time any endearing characteristics. Rather shw plays the role as a kind of irritated chorus whose only goal is to smooth the transition between Sicilia and Bohemia 16 years later. Peacock does have cause to be irritated. Time has only one speech and Cimolino has cut some key lines making it even shorter. Some of these cut lines link the time we spend watching the play to the time we leap over in moving from Act 3 to Act 4, one of the many metatheatrical passages, like those of the Chorus in Henry V, that make The Winter’s Tale such a rich source for understanding Shakespeare’s view of art and the theatre.

Despite this, the scenes in Sicilia are so powerful, Autolycus so perfect and the final transformation scene by lantern-light so beautiful that this production of The Winter’s Tale is one with much to enlighten and much fondly to remember. You don’t want to wait another 15 years for a production of this great play to come along, so see it now.

Christopher Hoile

Photos: Curtain call – (front row) Sara Topham as Hermione, Graham Abbey as Leontes and Yanna McIntosh as Paulina; (front) Andre Sills as Polixenes, Sara Topham as Hermione, Graham Abbey as Leontes, (centre back) Philip Myers as mamillius and Tom Rooney as Camillo; Geraint Wyn Davies as Autolycus; Yanna McIntosh as Paulina and Graham Abbey as Leontes. © 2025 David Hou.

For tickets visit: www.stratfordfestival.ca