This Tale leaves us bored by the bard

REVIEW

The Winter’s Tale BBC4, and BBCiPlayer

How instantly normality can fall apart. The Winter’s Tale, one of Shakespeare’s weirder plays, illustrates the point beautifully. King Leontes (Joseph Kloska, The Crown’s Lord Carnarvon) is abruptly stricken by inexplicable jealousy, then accuses his pregnant wife Hermione (Kemi-Bo Jacobs, right) of cuckolding him with his best friend, Polixenes. He finds himself without everything: his two children, his wife, his ability to live with himself in peace. The baby daughter is exiled.

Erica Whyman’s RSC production was meant to hit Stratford last year. For obvious reasons it’s been filmed instead, for BBC4’s Lights Up season. Filmed literally as a stage production too, performed to an empty luminous filmed version of Romeo And Juliet, but didn’t.

Instead, Whyman’s production is conventional to its marrow. The 1950s-1960s setting glibly suggests the shift from Leontes’ autocratic court to liberated Bohemia, with the latter scenes tiresomely deploying the familiar RSC trick of using rock music to signify something a bit alternative. Far better are the performances themselves – always clear, often affecting. Kloska’s Leontes, for example, is almost Trumpian as he reveals the pathetic little man behind the raging misogynist.

Whyman cleverly casts the bear of ‘exit, pursued’ fame as a group of avenging women. And the final reunion scene, in which Hermione can’t bring herself to even look at her husband, is as strained as you could wish. However, the RSC talks a lot about reaching new audiences. It won’t do so with productions as unexciting as this.

Cool reception: Joseph Kloska and Kemi-Bo Jacobs can’t rescue this auditorium. It’s a deadly format and reflects poorly on the RSC, who could have chosen to do something radical in the way of Simon Godwin’s recent