That productions of Shakespeare’s plays are finding no shortage of outlets in the Wellington region is as true this year as it has ever been. But it’s not just the Bard’s best-known works either: demonstrated by the Lonely Shakespeare Collective’s current production of Cymbeline.

Many things work against it as a play, not the least of which is its length and the difficulty commentators have in deciding the type of play it is. It’s also very complex, ranging across many locations and time spans and from intimate love scenes to raging battles. It also seems to incorporate many elements of other better known Shakespearean plays.  

Yet for all that this production works exceedingly well … [More] 

Copyright © in the review belongs to the reviewer

It’s tempting to think Will Shakespeare was tidying up his study one day, dropped his card collection of character types and plot devices, gathered up a fistful and, just for the fun of it, set himself the task of making a play from that random lot.

Or maybe he was under pressure to give The King’s Men a new play in 1609 and, having scored a box-office hit with Pericles the previous year, co-written with the dodgy innkeeper George Wilkins (involving incest, shipwrecks, tournaments, pirates, brothels and the test of a pure maiden’s virtue), he wanted to regain artistic control.

Cymbeline was followed over the next two years by The Winter’s Tale and The Tempest and scholars tend to group them as Shakespeare’s late tragi-comic Romance plays. Serious scholars see Cymbeline as indicating an important change in thematic preoccupation.

The tropes that recall past plays and foreshadow those to come include controlling fathers, wives having to defend their virtue and integrity in the face of doubting husbands whose best mates may or may not be predatory, rings and bracelets as tokens of love that become ‘evidence’, women dressing as men to stay safe in a hostile world, a mere change of clothes allowing someone to masquerade as another, a sleeping potion that causes its taker to appear dead …

The director of this Lonely Shakespeare Collective production, Ivana Palezevic, calls it “an amusing and ambitious piece of writing” and notes it is Shakespeare’s third-longest play, so she has ‘de-constructed’ it to fit a cast of eight while keeping the essence of the story intact. It works a treat, belying the hard work she must have done to achieve it.

As the titular Cymbeline, King of Britain, Anthony Hogan vents his fury at his daughter Imogen’s secret marriage to his lower-caste ward Posthumus and banishes him for his impudence. Hogan also plays the more kindly, if infirm, Roman nobleman Philario, who welcomes the banished Posthumus to Rome.

James Bayliss is suitably upright and staunch as Posthumus and perhaps overdoes the physical contrast as Cloten, louche son of Imogen’s wicked stepmother (named just Queen in the script) who aspires and conspires to elevate him to the throne. It’s a notable doubling nevertheless.

Echoing elements of his Parolles in All’s Well That Ends Well just a few weeks ago, Hamish Boyle’s Iachimo (a.k.a. Jachimo), a self-styled proto Don Juan, blithely bets Posthumus he can seduce his pining young bride when he joins a Roman delegation to the court of Cymbeline – who compounds his misjudgements by taking a shine to the rogue. The ring Imogen gave Posthumus is the prize (shades of Much Ado here, too, as well as All’s Well).

As with many devices in Shakespeare, our credulity is tested when Iachimo, unable to seduce Imogen, hides in a trunk then sneaks out while she sleeps to note details of the room and filch the bracelet her husband gave her as supposed proof he’s had his way with her. But because this cast accepts it, and Iachimo’s entry from the trunk into a completely different scene as well, without question, we ‘buy it’ too.

What may possibly have been put down to typical laddish nonsense turns serious when Posthumus falls for Iachimo’s story and orders his faithful servant to kill Imogen. As Pisanio, Michael Phol anchors the play with unadorned humanity and integrity.  

Boyle also plays Aviragus, one of Cymbeline’s long-lost sons, alongside Annica Lewis’s Guideria, judiciously feminised from Guiderius, which makes her hunting skills and summary beheading of Cloten all the more dramatic. Lewis also plays a Frenchman as a Frenchwoman, giving an extra dimension to her opinion that a woman’s chastity is not worth fighting over.

Especially interesting is the feminising of Belaria (Belarius being the loyal general falsely accused of treason by his king, whereupon he kidnapped Cymbeline’s sons and raised them as hunters in a Welsh mountain cave). Laura Loach manifests an effectively subtle distinction between the scheming Queen and maternal Belaria. Given the cutting of so much text, I’m happy to see Belaria as the siblings’ actual mother, Cymbeline’s first wife, assumed dead. Only in the resolution scene does it become apparent an actual rewrite would be needed to make it work (e.g. accused of infidelity she absconded with her babies … so that Cymbeline’s regret at misjudging her would be even more profound).

The fourth character to be feminised is Cornelia, the doctor who concocts remedies from plants and, realising the Queen is wanting to poison someone, gives her a sleeping potion instead. Quite why someone decided Amalia Calder should play her as the Queen’s Fool, with a broad regional accent, escapes me. Perhaps the idea comes from the eccentric Apothecary in Romeo and Juliet.

Calder also plays the Roman ambassador and soldier Caius Lucius along with Phol’s Roman Captain – and here I must commend the splendidly compacted yet dynamic and visually articulate fight sequence involving most of the cast, choreographed by Carrie Thiel.  

At the centre of it all, of course, is Imogen (a.k.a. Innogen – which I put down to a transcriber’s bad writing). Ivana Palezevic brings great clarity and spirit to the role as she stands up to her father, sets forth – in the male persona of Fidele – to find Posthumus, nearly falls foul of the cave dwellers, risks being buried alive by taking the sleeping potion and makes her final forgiveness of her doubting husband look like further proof of her strength of character.

As the only actor not playing two or more roles, she merges acting and directing without missing a beat. This Imogen is no impossibly virtuous maiden placed on a patriarchal pedestal but a self-determining woman whose honour and integrity can stand the exacting gaze of a modern audience.

To mark the apparent death of Fidele, Laura Loach, Annica Lewis and Hamish Boyle offer an exquisite rendition of Roger Quilter’s ‘Fear No More the Heat of the Sun’ in three-part harmony (arranged by Loach).

The simple set, created by Technical Director Crystal Pulkowski, features a clock – symbolising, the programme notes, “the precious value of time” – which magically changes colour. And the Dome above the acting space is also judiciously enhanced by lighting effects.

Don’t miss this rare chance to see this intelligently rendered and easily digested Cymbeline. Wellington last saw it in 2001 at VUW’s Studio 77 Amphitheatre, when Peter Hambleton directed it for Summer Shakespeare. It was last done in Auckland at the Dog’s Bollix Irish Pub in 2006, directed by Stuart Devenie. 

Copyright © in the review belongs to the reviewer