THEATRE REVIEW: CYMBELINE


JOHN COULBOURN,
Special to TorSun
01 JUNE 2012
R: 5/5



Pictured: Graham Abbey, Cara Ricketts

STRATFORD — As he prepares to assume the mantle of artistic director of the Stratford Shakespeare Festival — where he has already served as everything from actor and leading man to General Director — Antoni Cimolino seems to have recognized that one must walk before one runs. To that end, he’s abandoned distractions like rock music scores and time shifting, which marked his earlier flawed forays as a director of Shakespeare, and embraced notions like textual clarity and solid performance instead The result is a production of Shakespeare’s oft-overlooked CYMBELINE that, for fans of the classics, ranks as nothing less than a must-see production. CYMBELINE opened on the intimate stage of the Tom Patterson Theatre Thursday.

Featuring a labyrinthian plot that all but defies description, the work is set in the court of Cymbeline (Geraint Wyn Davies), King of the Britons, in the time of the Roman occupation — a court filled with intrigue and strife. While his new queen (Yanna McIntosh) plots against her lord and master in an attempt to place her own son, the thuggish Cloten (Mike Shara), on the throne, Cymbeline himself is in a rage because of the romance that has sprung up between his beloved daughter Innogen (Cara Ricketts) and Posthumus (Graham Abbey, reclaiming the spotlight on these stages), an orphan raised in the court of the king.

But when Cymbeline, determined to force his daughter into the arms of his conniving stepson, exiles Posthumous in a fit of pique, the king inadvertently sets in motion a plot that comes close to bringing his entire world tumbling down around him. Posthumous ends up in Italy where he meets the ignoble Iachimo (Tom McCamus) who succeeds in casting doubt on Innogen’s fidelity and driving a fatal wedge between the two lovers. As if all of that is not enough to set your head to spinning, Shakespeare throws in a sub-plot involving a long-exiled nobleman (John Vickery) and Cymbeline’s kidnapped sons (E.B. Smith and Ian Lake), long presumed dead, for good measure.

This is, it must be said, a hugely impressive ensemble, its numbers swelled by the likes of Peter Hutt, Nigel Bennett, Ian Clark, Andrew Gillies, Brian Tree and a host of others — and from the very top of the show, Cimolino makes the most of its talents, shaping performances that showcase the best of each actor’s individual skills, while still serving the complex demands of text and story. This is a CYMBELINE that will keep you constantly engaged and often delighted, even as it wracks up more happy endings than a whole book of fairytales.

And while he makes the most of his technical team — sets by Scott Penner, costumes by Carolyn M. Smith, lighting by Robert Thomson and music by Steven Page — Cimolino keeps the focus on his superb cast, never allowing them to be overshadowed by directorial or technical flourishes. Rather than trying to impress by entirely reinventing the work, he incorporates the best of previous productions and adds his own ideas to make this production thoroughly and completely his own. And it pays off in spades. Wyn Davies, Ricketts, Abbey, McIntosh, Shara, McCamus — they all give performances that are utterly fearless and little short of thrilling, supported at every turn by a strong supporting cast, each of whom seems to not only know his stuff, but his place within the production as well.

As he prepares to assume artistic control of his beloved Festival, Cimolino has proved that while he is prepared to let fine actors talk the talk, he has finally learned, at least from a directorial point of view, to walk the walk.