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.
