Cymbeline

by William Shakespeare

seen at the Sam Wanamaker Playhouse on 12 March 2016

Sam Yates directs Emily Barber (Imogen - or Innogen as the Globe researchers have preferred to call her), Jonjo O'Neill (Posthumus), Calum Callaghan (Cloten), Joseph Marcell (King Cymbeline), Pauline McLynn (his Queen) and Eugene O'Hare (Iachimo) as part of a season of Shakespeare's four 'romance' plays.

The plot of Cymbeline is over-complex, with princes kidnapped at birth, a loving couple separated and subjected to mischievous misinformation, a king besotted with an evil queen, a fraught political situation, and a final scene in which all is straightened out in a manner that always threatens to fall into sheer absurdity as one character after another comes forward with a variation of 'oh, but that means .... ' The unlikelihoods and coincidences pile up in what ought to be a fatally damaging mess, but given the right direction, it can all prove both entertaining and curiously satisfactory.

This production proves the point. The several strands of the plot are played out seriously, which means that many of them could prove disastrous for the characters - and indeed Cloten the hapless son of the queen is decapitated. The final resolutions, though inevitably comic in their pell-mell succession, transform what could have been tragedy into benevolent reconciliation. The unreasonable jealousy of Posthumus leads not to murder as Othello's does, but into timely remorse. The murderous plots of the queen do not engender the slaughter of Macbeth's career; the intransigence of Cymbeline does not lead to Lear's catastrophe even though he is quite as angry at his daughter to begin with.

Threading her way through all this is Emily Barber as a redoubtable and intensely likeable Innogen. She is clearly in love with Posthumus and her initial scenes with him are sunny and delightful. But her force of character is more readily displayed in adversity, in her steely resolve not to be cowed by either her father or her stepmother. Later, she shames Iachimo when he attempts to seduce her; he can only gain his advantage through subterfuge when she is asleep. The bitter blow of Posthumus's accusation against her is registered by both a passionate wish to die and by an equally enthusiastic willingness to follow a plan which might lead to setting all things right. At all times the performance is winning and believable.

Posthumus, ardent yet impressionable, and absent from the play for a long stretch, is a difficult character to bring off, but Jonjo O'Neill does the part credit. He is a good match for Innogen, and though his wager against Iachimo brings him perilously close to the callowness of Bertram in All's Well that Ends Well or Claudio in Much Ado About Nothing one feels that his remorse is given more credibility, and so that his ultimate good fortune is not irksome.

In contrast, Calum Callaghan gives an excellent performance as Cloten, the rejected suitor and the butt of endless jokes and insults. His insufferable self-confidence is a subtly rendered comic turn, with little yelps of outrage and incomprehension when he realises he is being guyed or insulted. We see an indulged boy fatally out of his depth having been thrust into the court at the highest level by his mother's marriage to the king, This is just hinted at - the character is hardly to be taken seriously even by the audience - but his frightened apology on his last exit (not in the original text) sums him up entirely. That his headless trunk should in the next scene cause Innogen so much anguish (since he had dressed himself in her husband's clothes) gives a macabre twist to his general ineptitude.

On top of all its narrative implausibilities the play also contains a dream sequence in which Jupiter descends at the request of Posthumus's dead family while the remorseful hero sleeps. This is just the sort of scene to show off the technical resources of an indoor theatre, and a suitably imposing (though female) figure descended from the opened ceiling bathed in bright light. This event, which can look ludicrous in a larger more traditional theatre where the temptation to over-play special effects is stronger, worked surprisingly well in the Sam Wanamaker Playhouse. In fact, the whole farrago, kept within the bounds of this intimate space, is one of the most successful productions to have been staged there.