Ruth Leon recommends…. Cymbeline – Stratford Festival
Ruth Leon recommendsCymbeline
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Cymbeline’s plot is too complicated to tell in a few words which doesn’t really matter because it makes a sort of sense when you watch it. Shakespeare has fused romance, comedy and tragedy to create a unique fantasia brimming with mistaken identities and gender-swapping disguises.
Cymbeline’s daughter, Innogen, one of Shakespeare’s most celebrated heroines, is thrust into the world of court politics and ruthless personal ambitions when she chooses a lover beneath her station. Deceived by the dastardly Iachimo, a worthy contender for the Bard’s all-time greatest villain, Innogen must fight to protect her honour and agency.
This production from Canada’s Stratford Festival was directed by Esther Jun. The cast includes Allison Edwards-Crewe as Innogen, Lucy Peacock as Cymbeline, Jonathan Goad as Belarius, Jordin Hall as Posthumus Leonatus, Irene Poole as Pisanio, and Tyrone Savage as Iachimo.
If you’re not familiar with Cymbeline this is a good introduction to a Shakespeare play that is much less frequently produced than the usual suspects – Hamlet, Lear, Macbeth, and the rest – but no less attractive for its verbal delights and plot twists.
Stratford Festival encourages subscriptions at £6.44 ($7.99) a month or £64.47 a year, even offering new subscribers 50% off the first three months with the code 3MONTHS. Or you can rent it for 3 days for £6.38.
It can hardly be “a good introduction” to the play when “Cymbeline, King of Britain” is “re-imagined” as a woman. Cymbeline is one of the late romances — a group notoriously including The Winter’s Tale, Pericles and The Tempest — in which Shakespeare has a lot to say about fathers and daughters, particularly daughters lost (Miranda, alone among them, was lost WITH her father, the others — Imogen, Marina, the symbolically-named Perdita — lost FROM theirs).
It was well reviewed in Canada and is doubtless a delightful thing to watch. But making Cymbeline a queen and the mother rather than the father of Imogen (or Innogen, the Stratford, and probably the original — though not the usual — usage) changes a dynamic running throughout the late plays.
Cymbeline is probably the least interesting character in “Cymbeline.” My introduction to the play was a beautiful production in Central Park’s Delacourte Theater. Liev Schreiber, whom I had never encountered, was a chilling Iachimo. The Imogen was well along in a pregnancy (yet disguised as a boy) but it didn’t matter–she was radiant.