Cymbeline

Sam Wanamaker Playhouse, 14/01/25

Credit: Marc Brenner

Final rating: ★ ★ ☆ ☆ ☆

This is one of Shakespeare's lesser performed works, and probably for good reason. It feels like a mis-mash of ideas, all trying to do something different and leaving one hell of a resolution to make in the final few scenes. That said, there are some terrific individual characters and some great comic moments set against some of the darker tragic themes also taking place. This, Director Jennifer Tang's Globe debut, sadly feels as though it was trying to do too much. Far too much.

Let's start with the casting, and the quite considerable gender swapping. Innogen (Gabrielle Brooks) and Posthumus (Nadi Kemp-Sayfi) were both women, making this at heart a lesbian love story, bound by the unfair jurisdiction of a male-dominated world. That theme is interesting, and provided some moments of agony that were elevated in this new context. That said, I found Kemp-Sayfi's characterisation somewhat annoyingly played - almost as though she was constantly trying to prove herself in this role. Everything was delivered with a bold, loud conviction - which resulted in a fairly stiff one-note performance. Brooks' Innogen was not played much better, with her characterisation not really given any sense of control. It felt like she bundled from one scenario to the next somewhat helplessly. Martina Laird's Cymbeline again I found quite confusingly played. The character deteriated over time - presumably withered by the impact of her daughter disappearing. But the end result looked at best like she was playing the character drunk, and at worst like she kept forgetting her lines.

Some of the details were adapted to fit the ensemble. For instance, the courtiers would worship Gaia rather than Jupiter, to make up for the gender swapping in the casting. But the strange addition of breathing techniques and performative stress when characters processed emotions I found quite distracting. Then there was the music, which is really where I had problems with this production. There was a focus on creating sound from 'everyday objects', which translated to the use of bowls of water for texture, chiming lightbulbs, and percussion with stones and a pestle and mortar. But it often took my attention completely away from the action on stage, either because it was too loud or just plainly too weird. At points it was even laughable. The grinding noises were actually uncomfortable at points too. And the singing accompaniments (which I believe is termed as ululating) - while trying to be traditional - were often just bad and out of tune.

I found myself having to try very hard to follow my investment in the action on stage. Jordan Mifsúd's Cloten was a rose amongst the thorns, and you could really feel how comfortable he was commanding the stage, with some at times anachronistic ad-libs. But he provided a lot of comic relief, or at least, relief from the strange musical accompaniments going on, and for that I was glad. The bedroom scene between Iachimo (Pierro Niel-Mee) and Innogen (Brooks) was also very well done, and again it was one of the moments that was allowed to breathe by itself rather than have an unusual soundscape playing over it.

While a lot of the issues I have are with the production itself, I can't help but feel the overall adaptation of an already tricky text was not necessarily going to be a winning formula. Perhaps this one is best left alone again for a while, until someone else wants to take on the challenge of smoothing out the Bard's shakey storytelling.