THEATRE REVIEW: Cymbeline, RST, Stratford-upon-Avon is one of the stories, places or details that helps explain why the Cotswolds stays with people long after they leave.
You will find the background, local detail and small points of interest that make THEATRE REVIEW: Cymbeline, RST, Stratford-upon-Avon worth knowing about, especially if you enjoy the stories behind the Cotswolds.
11/05/2016
By Colin Davison Rating: ★★★★☆
It comes up once in a generation, the question of our place in Europe, or to put it another way Cymbeline, Shakespeare’s rarely performed play about – at least in part – what it means to be British.
It comes up once in a generation, the question of our place in Europe, or to put it another way Cymbeline, Shakespeare’s rarely performed play about – at least in part – what it means to be British.
The piece opens with the ancient Brits under Cymbeline refusing to pay tribute to Rome (or Treaty of, if you prefer). Except that director Melly Still has set the work in a dystopian future, in a fiercely independent dustbin England, a Swampy-land of ragged rebels.
Then we end up paying those Continental bills after all, for the sake of peace and harmony. It’s okay – you don’t have to vote immediately.
Ms Still’s other major departure is to change the gender of major characters, which generally works well.
Cymbeline is cast not as king but as queen, played by Gillian Bevan as a feisty Boudicca. As the formerly subjected sovereign she certainly adds new meaning to the text when confiding with some relish about her past service to Caesar: “My youth I spent much under him.”
The gender-bending does rather conveniently mean the baddies are mostly blokes, the bolder Brits mostly women. It’s one of the rewards of getting to direct your own show.
Much of the action is observed by a whited-up black actor, Temi Wilkey as the soothsayer, presumably here a race-less refugee.
That sense of national intermingling is reflected also in the occasional use of different languages with surtitles, Italian, French and a dum-di-dum Latinum that unfortunately clunks like Virgil read aloud in school.
Nor was the English in this rather florid late work always easy to detect, let alone understand, at least from the side stalls.
Bethan Cullinane as the heroine Innogen drove the narrative with dynamic force, determined, sympathetic, self-possessed as she needed to be to spend so much of the play in her PJs.
Hiran Abeysekera was a boyish, prettily-spoken Posthumus with an ear for subtlety.
Marcus Griffiths turned in a raunchy serenade as the rotter Cloten, with Oliver Johnstone suitably sinuous as the snake-in-the-grass Iachimo.
Cymbeline continues to 15 October. Tickets 0844 800 114 and online.
Colin Davison
Then we end up paying those Continental bills after all, for the sake of peace and harmony. It’s okay – you don’t have to vote immediately.
Ms Still’s other major departure is to change the gender of major characters, which generally works well.
Cymbeline is cast not as king but as queen, played by Gillian Bevan as a feisty Boudicca. As the formerly subjected sovereign she certainly adds new meaning to the text when confiding with some relish about her past service to Caesar: “My youth I spent much under him.”
The gender-bending does rather conveniently mean the baddies are mostly blokes, the bolder Brits mostly women. It’s one of the rewards of getting to direct your own show.
Much of the action is observed by a whited-up black actor, Temi Wilkey as the soothsayer, presumably here a race-less refugee.
That sense of national intermingling is reflected also in the occasional use of different languages with surtitles, Italian, French and a dum-di-dum Latinum that unfortunately clunks like Virgil read aloud in school.
Nor was the English in this rather florid late work always easy to detect, let alone understand, at least from the side stalls.
Bethan Cullinane as the heroine Innogen drove the narrative with dynamic force, determined, sympathetic, self-possessed as she needed to be to spend so much of the play in her PJs.
Hiran Abeysekera was a boyish, prettily-spoken Posthumus with an ear for subtlety.
Marcus Griffiths turned in a raunchy serenade as the rotter Cloten, with Oliver Johnstone suitably sinuous as the snake-in-the-grass Iachimo.
Cymbeline continues to 15 October. Tickets 0844 800 114 and online.
Colin Davison
