Berkeley Festival Makes the Best of 'Cymbeline'
Strong Production Saves Weak Play
San Jose Mercury News
No Wonder "Cymbeline" is so rarely performed. Thought by scholars to be the
third-to-last play Shakespeare wrote, it has all the hallmarks of a throwback to
his exuberant but unkempt youth -- the youth that produced "Titus
Andronicus." Berkeley Shakespeare Festival's excellent production of this
problematic romance caps a summer of good Shakespeare at the Bay Area's
professional festivals. It's worth seeing just because "Cymbeline" is such an
unknown, but also for director Laird Williamson's bold production conceit and
a splendid cast led by Robin Goodrin Nordli as Imogen and John Bellucci as
Posthumus Leonatus.
"Cymbeline" is sort of a history play about Roman Britain, and it has the
messiness and sprawl of the early "Henry VI" trilogy, an erratic work that bears
all the signs of a young playwright at work: passionate involvement with plot,
inability to control character. By "Cymbeline," he was a master of character,
but at the expense of plot, which boils over in all directions.
Though written four years and six plays after "King Lear," the father-daughter
conflict of "Cymbeline" is similar, but not as well wrought. The wicked
stepmother-queen, a variation of Regan and Goneril in "King Lear," is
something of an innovation, but Shakespeare writes her out just as she gets
interesting. She goes conveniently mad and commits suicide, offstage.
The ending is an unsettling mixture of the slick and the amateur. There's a
certain deftness in the way Shakespeare ties up something like 23 plot lines.
But it's also really pat: One character after another reveals an identity, a
motive, remorse, revenge, bam, bam, bam, thanks a bunch, who's next? We
have come a long way with Imogen and Posthumus, who almost lose each
other in a thicket of mistrust and poison, false accusations of adultery and
headless bodies mistakenly identified, and it seems a shame to water down
their beautiful reconciliation in this welter of explanations and recriminations.
To top off the problems, the play is only nominally about Cymbeline, who gets
all the character development he's going to get in the last eight minutes.
Before that, he's in perhaps four scenes. It's a compliment to Julian
Lopez-Morillas that he manages to give the old king some depth -- a bit of
royal rage, a cowardly deference to his lusty, black-hearted wife, a smidgen of
political conscience -- in the short time he's on stage.
Williamson has set the play in a futuristic world, peopled with interchangeable
jack-booted Romans and Britons. (The banished Belarius, who kidnaps
Cymbeline's sons and raises them to manhood, becomes a Welsh partisan.)
There are neither heroes nor havens here.
In this setting, Posthumus' arrogant wager about his wife's fidelity does not
seem out of place or out of character; and the corrupt Iachimo, who
convinces Posthumus that his wife has "played the strumpet in his bed," is
just part of the impersonal milieu. (A clever contemporary touch: He takes
pictures of Imogen's bedroom and body with a pocket camera -- irrefutable
proof to Posthumus that Iachimo has occupied both.)
The spare set, designed by the director, bristles with tubular stainless steel.
At center stage, a metal sculpture of a nude woman has sections of its skin
flayed away to reveal the raw grid beneath. Two octagonal metal pieces, like
the frames of stop signs as large as wading pools, double as all the furniture,
as stumps and rocks in the forest; on end, as portals and cave mouths and
scaffolds where the damned are strapped for flogging.
This no-man's-land doesn't altogether work dramatically, especially as the play
warms up and reverses course for the denouement, but most of the way
through it provides a grim world in which Imogen's goodness provides the only
light. Equally chilling and effective are the monochromatic, totalitarian-state
costumes by Warren Travis and the hard-edged lighting design by Kurt
Landisman. Nordli humanizes a role often played for one-dimensional
sweetness; her Imogen has snap and intelligence and a temper. We feel her
genuine friendliness for Iachimo, who seems a personable kind of guy; and
when she rejects the wolfish advances of her step-brother, Cloten, who says
he'll tell her father on her, she turns on this mama's boy and says icily: "Thy
mother, too."
Bellucci, in a performance the equal of his wracked Angelo in last summer's
"Measure for Measure," works his way through Posthumus' arrogance and anger
to suffering and forgiveness.
The cast also encompasses -- and these are but the top layer of a strong
company -- Lura Dolas, slinky in a black Louise Brooks bob, as the queen;
Douglas Sills as the charmingly amoral Iachimo; Peter A. Jacobs as Cloten, a
petty tyrant who bullies only those weaker than himself; and Amy Ukena,
made up to look like the warden of a concentration camp, as the doctor who
concocts the queen's poisons.
You won't find too many famous Shakespearean quotes in "Cymbeline," but it
has two of the loveliest songs in the canon: "Hark! Hark! the lark!" and "Fear
no more the heat o' the sun." The settings by Richard Marriott are the only
disappointments in the production: a jackdaw chorus for "Hark! Hark!" and a
spoken recitative for "Fear no more." There are beautiful settings of these
poems by many composers, and Ralph Vaughan Williams' dark "Fear no more"
would have suited even this dark, bone-chilling production.
-Judith Green, San Jose Mercury News
August 8, 1990
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