'So so' is good, very good, very excellent good; and yet it is not; it is but so so

After a so-so Macbeth at the Old Globe in 1996 and a so-so Othello in 1997, I was pretty excited about going to see As You Like it in 1998. We even took the kids. I don’t know what they thought of it, but for me it was disappointingly so-so. I started getting a little depressed, especially when thinking about the cost of all those tickets. Then an even bigger worry came along: should we go again in 1999? The play was Cymbeline, which I had never seen before, on stage or screen. I had read it, though, and it had immediately become one of my favorite plays.

No one likes Cymbeline. Well, I say “no one” but I mean no one who reviews productions of it. They call it one of Shakespeare’s lesser plays, or one of his later plays that he wrote when he was tired, or at least retired. They call it a hodgepodge, a catch-all of devices culled from earlier plays. Or (and this I see all the time) they quote Samuel Johnson, who referred to it as “unresisting imbecility”, and G B Shaw, who said it was “stagey trash” and wrote a new ending for it that is kind of funny but really misses the point.

But Samuel Johnson also thought Americans had no right to govern themselves. He said if Americans wanted representation in Parliament, they should move to England and buy an estate. How come nobody quotes that when reviewing a production of 1776? Huh? How come?

As for Shaw, I heard somewhere that he thought he was a better playwright than Shakespeare, so what else would you expect him to say about Cymbeline?

Anyway, it’s my feeling that most of the time when a reviewer resorts to the easy path and takes cheap shots by quoting these two geniuses (and I mean that with all true intent and not a bit of sarcasm), what has happened is that the reviewer has Googled “Cymbeline” because he or she knows next to nothing about the play. If you read on in the review and find them confusing characters or misspelling names or just getting the facts plain wrong, which happens a lot, you can be pretty dang sure that the first time they ever even came in contact with the play was when they saw the preview.

So, I decided that, in spite of the mediocrity of the last three plays in the last three years, I would try once again. So we went and saw Cymbeline. But we didn’t take the kids.

This time, it was held in the actual Old Globe theatre, the indoor venue, not the Lowell Festival Theatre, which is outdoors. As we walked in I noticed a bright yellow and red steamer trunk silently spotlighted center stage. Behind it hung a bright red curtain, and around and over it was scattered a jumbled collection reminiscent of an antique store: more steamer trunks; a gramophone; a large wooden eagle; cardboard cutouts of Napoleon on a horse, of soldiers and gentlemen, of Caesar, life-sized, with his hand uplifted; a six-foot suspended dirigible; a globe of the world on a wooden stand; an old lamp; a red scooter; and other more arcane items.

“Well, this looks fun,” I thought.

And that’s what the play was.

It began with the eight cast members coming out from behind the red curtain, going to the trunk, and taking out a number of props and costume pieces. One took a crown (this was obviously Cymbeline), another a red robe, and a third a full-length skeleton. The ensemble then sang “Fear no more the heat o’ the sun” and danced with each other and the skeleton. When the song had finished, all but the Two Gentlemen sat in a row before the audience in wooden chairs. These two, dressed in evening clothes, proceeded to give the background information on the situation at court and the lineage of Posthumus. So that the audience would not lose track during this long explication, the First Gentleman went to the trunk and pulled out a piece of chalk and a small blackboard on which was laid out the genealogy of the Leonati. As he described the sad demises of the members of this family, he crossed their names out with the chalk. Then, when he admitted that Cymbeline had, indeed, two other children, he returned to the trunk for two small dolls, which he placed in the king’s arms and then snatched away almost immediately as he informed the Second Gentleman that the children “were stol’n, and to this hour no guess in knowledge which way they went.”

In order for eight actors to perform this play, there was a considerable amount of doubling. Even Imogen and Cymbeline made a brief appearance in act 1 scene 5, wearing masks and carrying flowers as two of the Queen’s ladies-in-waiting. The Two Gentlemen, Brian Lohmann and Dylan Chalfy, performed admirably their most difficult task of playing four or five roles each. When they were lords of Cymbeline’s court, they put striped robes over their tuxedos. When in Rome, they donned wigs and makeshift togas. As the waiting woman Helen, Chalfy wore a grey gown and white cap. He made no attempt to change his voice when speaking his lines, however, and the audience laughed at his exaggerated bass. Chalfy’s response was to glare at the audience as if he dared them to make fun of his having to appear as a lady of the court. As the long-missing sons of the king, Lohmann and Chalfy wore fur over their clothes and were uncouth in a dignified manner, or dignified in an uncouth manner; and they had the opportunity to sing a hauntingly beautiful arrangement of “Fear no more the heat o’ the sun” (music by Dan Moses Schreier).

Tony Amendola (Bra’tac for you Stargate SG-1 fans) played a heavily-accented Iachimo, sounding like a Mafia don and dressing like one, too. His pin-striped suit, black silk shirt, and white overcoat contrasted sharply with Posthumus’s tunic, hose, and boots, but the costuming was so eclectic that no one seemed to care. In fact, it was no stranger than having a pre-Christian Briton show up in Renaissance Rome. It also was no stranger than having Renaissance Rome look very much like a cheap Italian restaurant. When Iachimo gave an account of his “conquest” of Imogen to Posthumus, he did it while sitting at a little round table eating a plate of spaghetti al fresco.

The Queen (Brenda Wehle) wore a tight, electric green evening gown with matching heels. Hers was a modernized fairy tale step-mother – cruel and conniving as she strode across the stage giving orders to her son, her husband, her women, but she was really a figure to be laughed at. She inspired no true fear, only temporary discomfort. She held a fluffy little dog (a puppet) in her arm and stroked it as she spoke to the doctor, feeding it little bits of something until it flipped over in her lap and fell to the floor, apparently dead. The queen appeared unconcerned about the fate of her pet, and left it there, but when Cornelius picked it up, it began to wiggle again, underscoring the doctor’s words about the innocuous nature of the drugs he had been supplying to the queen, and letting the audience know there was no real threat.

David Lansbury, as Posthumus and Cloten, brought out the humor in both characters. Like his mother, Cloten was an irritant, and a buffoonish one at that. It almost made his death a mistake. Banish him, but kill him not. But he was funny while he lasted. As Posthumus, Lansbury brought me to one heart-stopping moment of awareness of his emotional pain, when he saw Imogen’s bracelet in Iachimo’s hand. His following soliloquy, however, was a stand-up comedian’s diatribe against women as he listed their faults and ascribed them to particular members of the audience: “flattering, hers” (point), “deceiving, hers” (point), “lust and rank thoughts, hers, hers” (point, point). It was funny while it lasted.

The one character who seemed to be honestly affected by what was going on around her was Imogen, played by Erika Rolfsrud. When Posthumus left her for Rome, she mourned. When her father raged at her, too angry for words (“Thou basest . . . thing!” “O disloyal . . . thing!” “Thou foolish . . . thing!” he sputtered), she answered him with eloquent wrath. Cloten’s untimely and insistent suit nearly shattered her self-control and she struggled to maintain her composure as she said, “I am much sorry, sir, / You put me to forget a lady’s manners / By being so verbal”. Her “O for a horse with wings” speech was beautifully rendered, revealing joy and longing intermingled; and her subsequent grief upon discovering that her husband wanted her dead was poignant.

Rolfsrud also did very well in what may be one of the most difficult Shakespearean scenes to act (and one that Shaw had a lot to say about) – that is, Imogen’s awaking from a drugged sleep and mistaking the headless body next to her as that of her husband. In this production, the corpse (if there was one) was not visible to the audience, having been placed lower than floor level. Imogen climbed out of this shallow “grave”, disoriented and frightened, and only slowly realized that the body next to her was not part of some nightmare. As she took inventory and concluded that it was her husband’s, the intensity of her delivery increased and she began an anguished sobbing, wracking out the lines “Alas, where is thy head? Where’s that?” Of all the times I’ve seen the play since, this first is the only time I have not heard the audience respond to that question with nervous or incredulous laughter. It was absolutely quiet. Imogen reached her hand into the grave and brought it up with blood dripping from her fingertips, which she touched to her face at the line “Give color to my pale cheek with thy blood.” At “O my lord, my lord!” she collapsed in misery on the corpse, and again there was a prolonged silence – from the audience as well – until Caius Lucius and his men appeared.

I have to say that when I went back and saw it again (yes, I went and saw it again), Rolfsrud’s timing was a little off, and her weeping had reached its particular intensity a little too soon, so that the question about the head didn’t sound quite right, and a couple of people in the audience laughed. Most of what I’ve read about this scene – by Shaw and by people who’ve performed it – has to do with the importance of the timing. But the first time I saw this scene, everything was right on; it was theatrical magic.

But the emotional depth was not to last long. Soon, the audience was treated to a battle between the Romans and the Britons. The Roman army consisted mostly of life-sized dummies dressed in Roman armor. Belarius (played by the same actor/actress who played the Queen, and she must’ve done a good job because my husband didn’t realize Belarius was played by a woman) and the two princes, accompanied by Posthumus, tossed the “soldiers” around while sound effects of battle noises filled the air. They used spears and swords, but Iachimo, who lost his sword almost at once, pulled out a pistol and started firing it. At one point, Cymbeline and Imogen (disguised as Fidele) passed each other on the battlefield, stopped, did a double take, shrugged, and ran on. Finally, with dummy corpses littering the stage, the battle ended with the Romans’ defeat.

The final scene was hilarious, with revelation after revelation (and, in the case of Lohmann and Chalfy, costume change after costume change), but no soothsayer. The trunk was back, however, and when Posthumus realized who Iachimo was and tried to lay hands on him, Iachimo ran for the trunk—a nice reversal of his earlier emergence from it in Imogen’s bedroom. When Posthumus thought he had him trapped, however, Iachimo escaped out the side away from the audience: the trunk had no back. But Iachimo was caught anyhow, and Posthumus forgave him, and Imogen and Posthumus were reunited, and Cymbeline said “Pardon’s the word to all”.

I was so happy with this production – finally something not so so-so! – that I went back a second time and took my children with me. As we sat there waiting for the play to begin, a woman sitting nearby said she thought it was wonderful that I had brought my kids to the play. I blathered on for a moment or two about exposing children to Shakespeare and other worthwhile forms of entertainment (I neglected to tell her that I also let them watch things like Pirates of Dark Water on tv, and that I watched it with them; she really didn’t need to know that). If I’d been completely honest, I might’ve said that bringing my kids was partly a good way to let them enjoy Shakespeare, and partly just an excuse for me to see the play again.