Kenneth Branagh’s film version of the production of The Winter’s Tale

Kenneth Branagh has filmed his production of The Winter’s Tale at the refurbished Garrick Theatre.  Choosing to film the play in the theatre is a far less expensive option than making a film of the play with its attendant costs, but there are downsides.

Garrick Theatre

This approach is designed to give the filmgoers the experience of being in the theatre and Branagh begins by giving the film-goers a lengthy (10 minute or so at least) shot looking down from the gods into the theatre. It is as if you are sitting in the theatre waiting for the play to begin. Following on from nearly 20 minutes of advertisements in the cinema, this is a trifle tedious.

This is followed by an introduction from Branagh which is only slightly less tedious than the shot of the inside of the theatre. But these are quibbles.

Less of a quibble is that the lighting in the theatre does not translate well onto the screen. The entire production is filmed in very low light that makes it difficult to discern some of the details which camera can pick up and that a theatre audience may not see. So the poor lighting loses one of the advantages of this particular form of production.

The other irritating problem with this film is that the cinematographer has not managed to get his focal lengths and perspectives right. Characters on the left-hand side of the stage are nearly three times as tall as those on the right.  As they move across stage, they either grow or shrink depending on which direction they are moving. Characters who come onstage from the left look as if they are walking in on stilts.

Now Branagh has made some of the best Shakespearean films in recent years:

Hamlet,

Henry the Fifth

and a glorious Much Ado about Nothing where he stars with the wonderful Emma Thompson,

So you would expect that he would understand how to bring a Shakespearean play to the cinema screen, but his cinematographer and his lighting director have lets him down fairly badly in this production.

So what is to like about this production? Pretty much everything else. As I’ve explained elsewhere, I don’t think this is a great Shakespearean play with its clunky plot and psychological improbabilities.  But this having been said, the acting is superb.

To start with, we have the incomparable Judi Dench as Paulina.  She brings a deep compassion to the role which has echoes of the fool in King Lear.  It’s a commentary on the longevity of the talent of this actor that she has now played all three of the women in The Winter’s Tale.

 Judi Dench as Paulina in the film of Kenneth Branagh’s 2016 production

 as Hermione in the Royal Shakespeare Theatre’s 1969 production

and as Perdita in the 1970 Royal Shakespeare Company’s production

Some actors have a special magic when it comes to Shakespeare and Judy Dench is one of them. She brings to the role of Paulina a passionate energy when confronted with injustice but also a note of sadness born of experience. Her final speech is Shakespeare at his best.

Paulina: There’s time enough for that; 
Lest they desire upon this push to trouble 
Your joys with like relation. Go together, 
You precious winners all; your exultation 
Partake to every one. I, an old turtle, 
Will wing me to some wither’d bough and there 
My mate, that’s never to be found again, 
Lament till I am lost.

Kenneth Branagh is excellent as Leontes particularly in Act 1 Scene 2 where he oscillates between his increasingly insane jealousy and the calm exchanges he must have to disguise it.

Leontes. Too hot, too hot! 
To mingle friendship far is mingling bloods. 
I have tremor cordis on me: my heart dances; 185
But not for joy; not joy. This entertainment 
May a free face put on, derive a liberty 
From heartiness, from bounty, fertile bosom, 
And well become the agent; ‘t may, I grant; 
But to be paddling palms and pinching fingers, 190
As now they are, and making practised smiles, 
As in a looking-glass, and then to sigh, as ’twere 
The mort o’ the deer; O, that is entertainment 
My bosom likes not, nor my brows! Mamillius, 
Art thou my boy?

and then when the floodgates open

There have been, 
Or I am much deceived, cuckolds ere now; 
And many a man there is, even at this present, 
Now while I speak this, holds his wife by the arm, 
That little thinks she has been sluiced in’s absence 285
And his pond fish’d by his next neighbour, by 
Sir Smile, his neighbour: nay, there’s comfort in’t 
Whiles other men have gates and those gates open’d, 
As mine, against their will.

After Paulina presents him with the baby Perdita and he begins a slow process of realisation of what he has done, Branagh’s Leontes shrinks as a stage presence and everything about him indicates the terrible price he is paying.

Antigonus with the baby Perdita. She is to be abandoned, he eaten by a bear

As a director, Branagh skilfully negotiates one of the difficulties of the play: the overlong wool shearing scene. He turns it into an Eastern European fertility rite with the shepherds, the shepherdesses and particularly Perdita brimming with erotic energy.

Tom Bateman and Jessie Buckley as Florizel and Perdita

Miranda Raison brings a quiet dignity to the role of Hermione, Leontes’ wronged wife.

Her response to Leontes’ histrionics is measured and restrained.

Hermione. No, by my life. 
Privy to none of this. How will this grieve you, 
When you shall come to clearer knowledge, that 
You thus have publish’d me! Gentle my lord, 
You scarce can right me throughly then to say 
You did mistake.……….

There’s some ill planet reigns: 
I must be patient till the heavens look 
With an aspect more favourable. Good my lords, 
I am not prone to weeping, as our sex 
Commonly are; the want of which vain dew 
Perchance shall dry your pities: but I have 
That honourable grief lodged here which burns 
Worse than tears drown: beseech you all, my lords, 
With thoughts so qualified as your charities 
Shall best instruct you, measure me; and so 
The king’s will be perform’d!

In the final scene she is revealed as the statue that, in true fairytale form, comes to life.

Her response is revealing.

Paulina  Turn, good lady; 
Our Perdita is found.

Hermione.You gods, look down 
And from your sacred vials pour your graces 
Upon my daughter’s head! Tell me, mine own. 
Where hast thou been preserved? where lived? how found 
Thy father’s court? for thou shalt hear that I, 
Knowing by Paulina that the oracle 
Gave hope thou wast in being, have preserved 
Myself to see the issue.

Not a word to Leontes.  Hermione has been waiting sixteen years in the hope that her daughter was alive.

And in his final speech Leontes does not have a word to say to Hermione.

If this play is reworking the themes of the great tragedies particularly Othello and King Lear, then redemption and reconciliation for Leontes are both muted and qualified.

 

The Winter’s Tale: pulling the threads together.

In The Winter’s Tale, Shakespeare has created a play that draws together many of the themes of the great tragedies, particularly King Lear, Hamlet and Othello.   As well, the female characters in this play also look back to Ophelia, Cordelia and Desdemona.

The plot

At the beginning of The Winter’s Tale, Polixenes, the King of Bohemia is visiting Leontes, the King of Sicily and his boyhood friend. During the visit, Leontes is overcome by jealousy and convinces himself that his wife, Hermione, is carrying Polixenes child.  To avoid Leontes’ murderous anger, Polixenes returns to Bohemia accompanied by Camillo  who had been charged, by Leontes, with murdering  Polixenes .

Leontes throws Hermione into prison where she delivers a baby girl. Despite the pleadings of Paulina, Leontes orders Antigonus, Paulina’s husband, to abandon the baby girl, Perdita, in the wilderness.

Antigonus takes Perdita to Bohemia where, for his troubles, he is eaten by a bear. Perdita is rescued and raised by shepherds.

At her trial, Hermione collapses on learning that her son, Mamillius, has died of grief at his mother’s imprisonment. She is whisked off stage by Paulina. Leontes is haunted by the deaths of his wife, son and daughter.

Sixteen years pass and Florizel, Polixenes’s only son and heir, has met and fallen in love with Perdita.

Perdita by Anthony Frederick Augustus Sandys

On learning of his son’s plans to marry her, Polixenes disowns Florizel who flees to Sicily with Perdita where they throw themselves on the mercy of Leonties.

Polixenes follows Florizel to Sicily where it is revealed to Leontes that Hermione is not dead but has been living in seclusion for sixteen years and that the young woman accompanying Florizel is his daughter, Perdita.

A mid-19th century painting of the statue of Hermione coming to life.

 This is followed by general rejoicing and forgiveness.

 Commentary 

This is not one of Shakespeare’s greatest plays. It is one of the late tragi-comedies: Pericles, Cymbeline and The Tempest being the others.  It’s been said that in these plays, Shakespeare revisits some of the themes of his great tragedies and seeks to find a dramatic solution (and resolution) to the tragic and human consequences of those plays.

However, when this play revisits some of the themes and ideas of the great tragedies, the effect is rather less satisfying than both an emotional and dramatic sense.

The most notable of these is the examination of the consequences of jealousy and suspected infidelity that is played out in Othello.  In The Winter’s Tale, Shakespeare poses the question: Is it possible to recover from the catastrophic effects of delusional jealousy?  Unlike Othello, The Winter’s Tale says yes. But the dramatic resolution that is presented in this play is less dramatically and emotionally satisfying than in the great tragedy.

 Frank Finlay as Iago and Laurence Olivier as Othello (1965)

In The Winter’s Tale, we see destructive jealousy overcome by Leontes’ penance and Paulina’s good offices.  But why? Paulina’s husband has been eaten by a bear while carrying out Leontes insanely jealous wishes to destroy his daughter.  Why would she wish him well?

Now, of course, there are answers to this question.  Most particularly, that Paulina is one of Shakespeare’s great female characters who wishes to support another who has been strong in the face of the most unreasonable  behaviour that you could possibly imagine: unjustified accusations of adultery.  Nonetheless, there is nothing in the text to support this particular view.

The Winter’s Tale also revisits the theme of parental blindness that is played out in King Lear.   The ending of The Winter’s Tale lacks the savage catharsis of King Lear.  It certainly lacks the terrible beauty of the poetry in the final scenes of the great tragedy.

But Lear’s reunion with Cordelia has an emotional and dramatic scale far beyond that of Leontes’ reunion with Perdita. If there is forgiveness and reconciliation at the end of The Winter’s Tale, then it is muted and subdued and shot through with sadness at the knowledge that the past cannot be undone.

There are other similarities between the two plays. Perdita and Cordelia are very similar characters, particularly in relation to their dramatic function within the plays. Both have been grievously wronged by their father, both bring healing, reconciliation and forgiveness at the end of play.

There is another echo from King Lear. Paulina plays a role very similar to the fool in King Lear. She is mercilessly excoriating in her attacks upon Leontes and he accepts them as a punishment for the wrong that he has done his family. But Paulina is a realist and her attacks on Leontes lack the dramatic and bitter irony of the fool’s attacks on Lear.

There are also echoes from Hamlet, particularly in the scene where Perdita distributes flowers at the  bacchanalian wool shearing scene that will conjure up memories of Ophelia’s distribution of flowers in Hamlet.

 Ophelia: .There’s fennel for you, and columbines.—There’s rue for you, and here’s some for me. We may call it “herb of grace” o’ Sundays.—Oh, you must wear your rue with a difference.

 Benjamin West’s depiction of Ophelia distributing flowers

 The echoes of this tragic scene are picked up in The Winter’s Tale:

Perdita: For you there’s rosemary and rue; these keep. Seeming and savour all the winter long: Grace and remembrance be to you both. And welcome to our shearing!

These parallels tend to highlight some of the of the central problems with this play.

In many ways, it’s a fairytale with a changeling princess (Perdita), a prince with a hidden identity (Florizel), a fairy godmother (Paulina) and statue that comes to life (Hermione) and of course a fairytale ending.

But there’s a lot of dramatic conjuring in the resolution of this human tragedy.  The audience is entitled to say “If we’re going to have fairytales, then they are better for being psychologically consistent and believable.”

 There are a number of elements that don’t quite ring true.

There is nothing in the play to explain Paulina’s motivation in hiding Hermione away for sixteen years and for her merciless attacks on Leontes.  Certainly he deserves it, but for sixteen years?

The problem is that Shakespeare needs sixteen years to pass for Perdita to grow up and Perdita and Florizel are essential to the happy ending.

 Tom Bateman as Doricles/Florizel and Jessie Buckley as Perdita

But this is simply a dramatic device that leads to a resolution of the dilemmas of play but it presents problems particularly in relation to the motivation of Hermione and Paulina.

Beneath these particular details of the similarities between this play and the great tragedies, there is a question: “Is Shakespeare returning to ideas of the great tragedies and finding resolution and reconciliation, albeit within the structure of the fairytale, or do we see a great dramatist whose creative skills are in decline who is now reworking and revisiting old ideas but without the dramatic energy and skill of the earlier plays?”

Many of the people who see this play will have read or seen many, if not all of the tragedies, so that references to earlier plays and the ethical and human dilemmas that they examine will be clear to many members of the audience.  So comparisons will be inevitable.

The dramatic role of the clown, Autolycus, is a case in point. There are funnier clowns in other plays and often these clowns will have important dramatic role to play. But this is not the case with Autolycus.

Autolycus (1836) by Charles Robert Leslie

He’s an entertaining rogue, vagabond, pickpocket and song and dance man but that’s it. He is a diversion and really has no, or little, dramatic impact on the play. He is a bit like the sheep-shearing party which is overly long and provides the audience with singing and dancing but does little else to justify the amount of stage time it has.

On balance, it doesn’t work all that well. The structure of the play, particularly the sixteen year gap in the middle exposes too many of the inconsistencies in the plot such as Paulina’s motivation for not explaining Leontes’ grief to Hermione.

 At the end of the play, we get the first hint of Pauline’s grief.

Paulina:  I, an old turtle,
Will wing me to some wither’d bough and there
My mate, that’s never to be found again,
Lament till I am lost.

Paulina then marries Camillo at Leontes’ behest.

Leontes:  I’ll not seek far— 
For him, I partly know his mind—to find thee 
An honourable husband. Come, Camillo, 
And take her by the hand, whose worth and honesty 
Is richly noted and here justified 
By us, a pair of kings.

Well, the audience didn’t see that one coming and don’t have much time to reflect on it as, eleven lines later, the play is over.  But not before this rather puzzling little statement from Leontes

This is your son-in-law, 
And son unto the king, who, heavens directing, 
Is troth-plight to your daughter.

Presumably he is speaking to Polixenes about Florizel and Perdita. So why does he refer to Florizel as your son-in-law and to predict her as your daughter? Passing strange!

When Polixenes disowns Florizel at the wool shearing dance, we are simply getting a reiteration of the dramatic tension that was set up in the early scenes: a father casting out the (seemingly) ungrateful child.

The audience knows that no good will come of this, it didn’t last time and it won’t this time. So why revisit the situation?

It’s the demands of the plot. The lovers have to fly to Sicily and Polixenes needs to follow so that the resolution of the final scene is possible.  It’s contrived rather than arising from the nature of the characters in the play or from their actions.

 So this play is rather like Novak Djokovic’s second service, pretty good but not going to produce any aces.