Cymbeline

by William Shakespeare

seen at the Sam Wanamaker Playhouse on 18 January 2025

Jennifer Tang directs Cymbeline, one of Shakespeare's late plays, which is full of incident, misunderstandings, disguises, and an almost absurd number of resolutions: a description of the plot on the page makes it seem utterly chaotic and implausible, but in performance (if well done) it can be fun, exciting, distressing and moving by turns - even though it is still implausible.

So it proves in this production in the intimate candle-lit space of the Sam Wanamaker theatre, the second time I have seen the play produced here (see the review of 12 March 2016). Cymbeline, a contemporary of Caesar Augustus, is facing a Roman invasion (not actually historical in Augustus's time), while his daughter Imogen (or now more commonly Innogen) has earned his wrath by marrying a commoner (of Roman extraction to boot); and his consort is the classic wicked stepmother with an uncouth son of her own (the aptly named Cloten, played by Jordan Mifsúd) who has designs on the hapless princess.

Here, in an ingenious twist to the political opposition between Britons and Romans, the whole society is imagined as being a matriarchy, and Cymbeline (Martina Laird) is the Queen rather than the King of Britain. Furthermore, Innogen's unapproved marriage is to a woman, an arrangement not remarked on in any way apart from the fact that it does not have the Queen's blessing (and is an obstacle to Cloten's desires). All the rituals of the court, and its religious rites, are female-oriented, with all references to Jupiter in the text replaced with prayers and invocations to Gaia. It's a remarkably effective idea to soften the effect of some significant 'gender-blind' casting, and it proves an intelligent way of creating a 'British' culture in preference to stereotyped Druidism.

Innogen (Gabrielle Brooks) and Posthumus (Nadi Kem-Sayfi) are parted almost as soon as they are married, and Posthumus gets involved in a rash wager that Innogen is chaste and faithful, which the scheming Iachimo (Piero Niel-Mee) apparently disproves by smuggling himself into her bedchamber and taking an inventory of its design and of Innogen's distinctive mole. The masculine aura of this shoddy wager is preserved even with Posthumus being female, and it is the trigger for much of the subsequent plot development.

Soon many of the characters are in Wales, well away from the court; the setting should be the wild hillsides, which is of course impossible in the playhouse. Nonetheless the verve of the production encourages indulgence on this point as on so many others, not least the propensity for several characters to adopt or be given false names and disguises which delay any chance of untangling all the cross-purposes. Even though the fact that Innogen mistakes Colton's headless body for that of Posthumus, simply because Cloten is wearing Posthumus's clothes, is rendered doubly implausible since one was a man and the other a woman, in the rush of events and the momentary revulsion inherent in the whole scene the confusion is allowed to pass.

In a series of revelations and explanations which provoke delighted hilarity in the audience, everyone finds out everything they need to know. With just the right amount of seriousness in the cast, these denouements pass muster, and all is as it should be - even the conniving Iachimo has a chance to reform. As Oscar Wilde much later had it, "the good end happily and the bad unhappily: that is the meaning of Fiction" .