REVIEW: Two-minded winter play sparkles in summer Shakespeare festival
The Winter’s Tale is Shakespeare’s great “problem play.” It has been staged with varying degrees of success for 500-odd years and is still regularly produced today.
At the Freewill Shakespeare Festival in Hawrelak Park until July 14, this is the “serious” play to balance the comic one (Two Gentlemen of Verona: READ REVIEW). Actually The Winter’s Tale is more of a comedy-romance. The problem is the Bard really wrote two stories in one play. The first half takes place in the bleak forbidding court of Northern Sicilia, where the driven King Leontes destroys his family with maniacal zeal, possessed by jealousy and hate. Part of the second half takes place in warm, sunny, pastoral Bohemia, and is filled with festivals, fun in the sun and gamboling sheep.
Connecting these two halves into a cohesive whole is the problem that the summer Shakespeare company presented to director Dave Horak. His production proves to be well grounded, his company persuasive, and it would take the most starchy of poltroons not to go along with the tonal shifts.
Sheldon Elter as King Leontes is most impressive. Violent and intimidating, he spirals out of control. Responding to his darker drives, he jails his dignified, pregnant (but innocent) wife, Queen Hermione (Nadien Chu), on charges of adultery – accusing her of “bed swerving,” with his best friend Polixenes (Jesse Gervais), the King of Bohemia. Leontes demands that Polixenes be hunted down and killed – but he escapes. When the child is born, the King refuses to acknowledge her as his, and the poor infant is abandoned (along with a considerable fortune) on a Bohemian coast. The child is discovered and raised by an Old Shepherd (Nathan Cuckow). She grows up to be beautiful and meets a prince and … well, you fill in the rest.
Elter has the toughest job of the night. His 180-degree character orbit requires the audience to make an empathetic leap between the brutal character of Act I and the chastened King of Act II. The actor skilfully takes us on his journey through the King’s realization of his misplaced fury and the steadfast chastity of his wife. The character who faces down the King’s fury, and for the next 16 years prods his conscience is one of Hermione’s lady attendants, Paulina (played with fierce determination by Belinda Cornish.) Nadine Chu is animated as the maltreated Queen and shines when, heartbroken and woeful, she is charged. In a show trial Leontes goes full Trump on her – charging her not only with adultery but with treason.
Their daughter, the lovely Perdita (played by the lovely Christina Nguyen ), now grown-up and of marriageable age, falls for the the studly Florizel (Oscar Derkx), disguised as a shepherd boy, who turns out to be – you guessed it – the prince.
Meanwhile, the King has been marinating in the melancholy of his cosmic tantrum, and upon meeting his grown-up daughter, realizes that his jealousy and rage have been misplaced and love must rule the land. His Queen, whom he thought died, has been immortalized in a statue but through some Shakespearean verbal conjuring and bit of effective theatrical legerdemain from Horak, the statue … well, I wouldn’t reveal the spoiler.
There are a couple of inspired moves by Horak. He shortens the play’s protracted ending by having much of it described, as actors mime the action. His ending is highly satisfactory even if one of the main characters just disappears. He also comes up with an innocuous child’s stuffed bear toy that grows before our eyes into a huge forest beast capable of tearing a man to bits.
Darrin Hagen’s sound rack pushes the action along and provides some catchy ditties for the Summer Sheep Shearing festival in which Chris Bullough (and his banjo) winningly performs as a singing-dancing rogue cutpurse.
This light diversion requires a sprinkling of theatrical magic and a good deal of suspension of disbelief to make the two parts work together. The director and his able cast conspire with the bucolic pleasures of an evening in the park (it rained right on cue during the intermission the night we were there) to fashion a delightful Winter’s Tale in the middle of Edmonton’s summer.
