The Winter’s Tale
Soulpepper Theatre Company
The National Post

This has been an extreme week of Shakespeare. From A Midsummer Night's Dream to The Winter's Tale, from actors in High Park bellowing against the breeze to actors snugly indoors at Harbourfront, gently taking us and one another into their confidence.

Joseph Ziegler's Soulpepper production of The Winter's Tale is beautiful, but uneven. In style it probably owes something to the conversational chamber productions that Robin Phillips directed in the '80s for Stratford's Young Company (from which, eventually, sprang Soulpepper). It shows us characters exploring their emotions rather than flaunting them. This has its pitfalls.

From time to time, Tony Nardi, as the jealous Leontes, shouts. It's thrilling, and I'm unregenerate enough to wish he would do it more often. Leontes, the Sicilian king whose sudden jealousy of Hermione, his queen, and Polixenes, his best friend, comes near to wrecking everybody's lives, has some of the most complex, twisted verse in Shakespeare. Nardi, an actor who apparently has done very little Shakespeare, can shape it but -- except when he's at the top of his lungs -- he cannot colour it. So the poison that infects Leontes's mind becomes something we observe rather than something we feel; and his equally sudden acceptance of the truth and of his own guilt -- admittedly one of the hardest moments to bring off in the whole of drama -- lacks size and impact. Nor does Nardi seem all that interested in the penitent Leontes we meet toward the end of the play: a section in which the whole production goes slack before picking itself up for the closing epiphany.

That's the prosecution. The defence is that Nardi's performance is psychologically very acute. He even looks Sicilian (not that Shakespeare's comic locations count for very much) and from the start nurses an inferiority complex conceivably caused by his being shorter than everyone around him. He is a disaster waiting to happen; the wonder here is not that his jealousy breaks forth but that it has taken so long to do so. Once it has, it develops its own infernal logic. The more it's argued with, the stronger it gets; and Ziegler has been careful to devise groupings for its subjects that are innocent in themselves but inflammatory to one already enflamed. This Leontes is more psychological case than tragic-comic hero, but he's a very plausible case.

Soulpepper's two presiding actresses are at their best. I've never seen Susan Coyne do anything as fine as Hermione's trial scene; she too is quiet (except for her sudden cry "the Emperor of Russia was my father" which is proud and anguished at once) but with great variety and lucidity, and a radiant dignity.

Nancy Palk rattles the ears and heart as Hermione's champion, Paulina; confronting the king with his newborn child she virtually throws it at him, daring him to drop it -- a wonderful moment.

There is also work at court, of various degrees of sturdiness, from Oliver Dennis, C. David Johnson, Robert Haley and (strong casting in small roles) Jim Warren and Marek Norman.

Guido Tondino's sets are uneven. Sicilia is pictured with torchlit, if oddly Scandinavian, elegance, but taste abruptly departs when we reach Bohemia, where the sheep-shearing festivities take place in front of something resembling a large sheet of multi- coloured tinfoil.

The Winter's Tale is an audaciously bisected play that skips 16 years and changes countries halfway through its action. The greatest challenge for any director is to make the two parts seem like one, and Ziegler can't really make us remember in Bohemia what we've been through in Sicilia.

Our new acquaintances, though, are great company.. David Storch's Autolycus is the freshest, funniest and most inventive I have seen; the play acquires a new dimension when this quicksilver con-artist enters it, and Storch, perching on the edge of the stage to accompany his songs on country guitar, draws us right into it.

He has a fine lunk of a foil in Paul Thomas Manz's Clown, who in turn is set off by William Webster's shrewd and tender Old Shepherd. The pastoral love-duets, with Christopher Morris an unfortunately hangdog Florizel, go for almost nothing, but when she detaches herself to debate the rival merits of art and nature, Patricia Fagan's Perdita shows considerable spirit.

When Hermione, revealed by Paulina as a statue, comes back to life at the end of the play, her union with Perdita, her long-lost daughter, strikes deeper in this production than her reunion with her husband. At least, it does at first.

Through the evening, Ziegler has brought off a succession of visual coups, but strangely, the descent of Hermione from her pediment is not one of them; it makes less effect here than it has been known to do in far weaker productions, even though it has been handsomely set up and Coyne herself could hardly look more statuesque. Then, at the close, the characters are sent off in a chain, hand-in-hand. It looks weak until you realize that the order exactly mirrors their relationships. In the final moment Leontes and Hermione, believably middle-aged, are permitted an embrace; and this becomes a play about a marriage.