TRAGEDY, JOKES, ORACLES, SINGING SHEEP AND A BEAR
After last year’s storming Macbeth, Red Rose Chain returns to the wooded site at Sutton Hoo for its second big outdoor production there. Once again Jo Carrick and a young professional cast – only 8 strong – frame it as a story told by circus or fairground players. They swop makeshift costumes and gleefully ignoring the fourth wall so that Leontes’ indignation , Paulina’s outrage and the wiles and songs of the pedlar Autolycus make demands or trade insults with the audience. It’s always a strange play: a late “romance” whose first act is a stark tragedy spurred by a jealous king’s folly, but whose second is larky pastoral comedy ending in general reconciliation and a magical resurrection.
As ever, Jo Carrick’s deep-rooted Shakespearianism and respect for the text underpins it even at its most absurd moments: the author was, after all, necessarily an attention-grabber and busker in a tough city, as well as a poet. Those who have trouble with Shakespeare clowns may find a bit too much Autolycus & co in the second half, but the kids will love it. And there are some wonderfully clever adaptations: at the start Camillo is no sober courtier pleading with Vincent Moisy’s furious half-demented Leontes but a colourfully clownish jester, twirling a stick and (clearly a relative of Lear’s Fool) cowed by arm-twisting royal authority but visibly appalled to the edge of amusement at the pure absurdity of the King’s suspicion. Apollo’s Oracle is on the phone (a Delphosphone) and the messengers in twin bowler-hats sing a version of “the Day we went to Bangor) on the way. Actually, while there is one really beautiful original song in the pastoral section – “It’s a lucky day, let’s do good deeds” the use of covers is brilliant, from “Quando quando” for the flirtatious court dancing at the start to a final chorus of “You always hurt the one you love”.
Which, after all is Leontes’ story: as old and foolish and banal and sad as any crime-passionel in any backstreet. Leontes has been baffling directors for centuries: what is WRONG with him to turn on a sixpence into wild suspicion? Here, he is simply any fool bloke in any street, wrecking a family out of dim pride. That works.
Last year I wondered how the life-and-death seriousness in the play could survive all the larking, and certainly Moisy can now forever claim to be the first Leontes to have doubled the part with the role of a singing, step-dancing Bohemian sheep. But actually there is real feeling here: his demented male rage (verging on Basil Fawlty at times) hits properly hard when he rejects Emily Jane Kerr’s dignified Hermione (who doubles as a rather less dignified Autolycus later). Ailis Duff, in that period of shock, is a brilliant Paulina: defiantly eloquent, demandingly angry, enlisting the audience. The puppet child Mamillius is genuinely unsettling too: skinny and tiny, sober-faced, first romping with three skilled puppeteers then reaching out baffled to his Dad. When his body is borne in to his horrified father it occurred to me, as it never has before, that nothing is so utterly, movingly dead as a dead puppet. The heart turns over.
So, much to enjoy: the audience did on opening night, and family audiences will do still more over the next four weeks, as the moon rises behind the lovely trees by the river and the jokes roar through the sadnesses. Ted Newborn is an impressive – and beautifully spoken – Florizel, as is Jack Spencer as his father Polixenes: having donned an absurd nose-moustache-and-specs disguise to spy on his son at the sheepshearing this King of Bohemia turns genuinely, harshly kingly as he whips it off and regains authority. These shows do require a certain fearlessness in actors.
Oh, and there’s a cracking Lloyd-Webber joke, and the famous bear is excellent, vast and black and hairy. Wish he could have taken a curtain call.
box office redrosechain.com to 26 August
rating four
theatreCat 