Weird tragicomedy Cymbeline is one hell of a play to choose for your Shakespeare debut, and rising star director Jennifer Tang somewhat flubs it with a fussy, high-concept take that does nothing to rationalise Shakespeare’s borderline-ludicrous plot.
Here, Ancient Britain is recast as a matriarchal society, with an odd, seemingly Maori-ish-but-everyone’s-wearing-trainers aesthetic, copious amounts of male-to-female gender swapping (including titular monarch Cymbeline), and every religious exclamation changed from ‘Jupiter’ to ‘Gaia’.
This is not an uninteresting idea to explore, not least because there is considerable evidence that pre-Roman Britain was a matriarchal society.
The trouble is that’s not the play that Shakespeare wrote, and while his writings are nothing if not malleable, it feels like Tang has imposed specificities on Cymbeline that simply don’t work with the text. The biggest problem is Nadi Kemp-Safi’s Posthumus. Here the wife – rather than husband – to Cymbeline’s daughter Innogen (Gabrielle Brooks), Posthumus gets banished by her mother-in-law and heads into exile to hang out with the all-male Romans. But it’s hard to really understand why this polite young woman agrees to a wager with Roman cad Iachimo (a deliciously smarmy Perro Niel-Mee) over whether he can bed Innogen, and furthermore it seems totally uncharacteristic for Posthumus to attempt to take out a hit on his beloved after being presented with some pretty flimsy evidence of her infidelity.
Of course, there is no reason why a female Posthumus needs to be any less of a dick than a male one. But the fact is Kemp-Safi has gone for a much more even tempered, reasonable and – dare I say it – less typically male approach to the character than is traditional. And unfortunately this is undermined by the extremely stupid things that Posthumus says and does.
It’s not a catastrophe, but there’s a sense of Tang having a vision that she simply hasn’t rationalised with the play itself. And the play was already a huge amount of work, kind of a comedy structurally but with some really bleak stuff in it like a main character getting their head brutally chopped off and the matter of the Britons and Romans having themselves a lil’ war at the end.
Tang styles it out as relatively light (but not actually an out-and-out comedy). There are some laughs, and Brooks and Kemp-Safi both have a nice line in injecting sarcasm into the text. But the darker stuff feels extremely low stakes and it’s ultimately a fiddly play made fiddlier by over-conceptualising. The Globe’s recent production of All’s Well That Ends Well – another problem play – was an out-and-out triumph that boldly made sense of the maddening eccentricities of plot by sheer force of directorial vision. This Cymbeline has its moments, but it’s not going to turn any doubters onto the play. The matriarchy deserves better!
