Cymbeline

[ellen_datlow]

I went with two friends to see Shakespeare's Cymbeline last night. What a lousy play. The first half's good, but the second is silly and way tooooo long (we didn't get out till 11pm). I can see why it's not performed very often. The last twenty minutes are taken up with increasingly ridiculous explanations of things we've already seen throughout the play--half the subplots could have been cut. Boy, did S need an editor for this particular work.

Luckily, the sets were striking and the acting usually very good, with Martha Plimpton, Michael Cerveris, Phylicia Rashad, and John Cullum. Now I've seen it I don't have to see it again. The three of us agreed on this.

Comments

[(Anonymous)]

Shakespeare's "Late Romances" the last plays that he wrote, have a lot of big problems. Even the one of them "The Tempest" that we all know and love has a last act in which the various characters stand around telling us things we've already seen. If you haven't noticed that in productions you've seen it's because the director decided to cut those lines. My theory is that this material was in there for use in case some of the other scenes were cut - if a scene was cut then the material in the last act where the action of that scene is described was used, if nothing was cut then you didn't use the last act summary at all.

An uncut Hamlet is a much different play from the one we usually see and it's an interesting if long experience. But that's a much better play to begin with. Last night's director Lamos did a lot of interesting things and had some of the better actors available in New York to work with. But the last thirty minutes were torture.

Rick Bowes

[ellen-datlow.livejournal.com]

Agreed!

<<<But the last thirty minutes were torture.

[desperance.livejournal.com]

I wrote a clerihew one time:

Cymbeline
Was a king, not a queen.
This is all I know
About the show.

(Oh, happy ignorance! Since then, I've seen it. Twice.)

[ellen-datlow.livejournal.com]

So what did you think of it and who was in it when you saw it?

[desperance.livejournal.com]

Didn't much admire the play, for reasons as stated above: it has more problems than it has sub-plots, which is too many. But I needed to see it once, because I'm a completist and it was almost the last Shakespeare I hadn't seen - and the RSC is always a draw; and, mmm, Emma Fielding! Anton Lesser!

And then last year the RSC was working in combination with other companies to produce every play WS wrote, so we saw it again in a really inventive co-production with Kneehigh Theatre. Sometimes the production can outshine the play, y'know?

[ellen-datlow.livejournal.com]

Oh yes, great productions with great casts can "disguise" many mediocre plays. But a truly bad play... not sure ;-)

[(Anonymous)]

I've not seen or read Cymbeline, but it's an interesting play for several reasons - it's known as one of the problem plays, as certain scenes would have been physically impossible to pull off in Shakespeare's day, and it was treasured by many poets, such as John Keats and Alfred, Lord Tennyson, who was buried with a copy of it. Virginia Woolf also used a couple lines from the play for Mrs. Dalloway. A friend of mine read it for an English paper, and she said that modern day scholarship claims that it was the result of Shakespeare playing around with some of his earlier favorite themes and tropes, while others think that he was fashioning a kind of national myth for Great Britain.

--Spencer Pate

[ellen-datlow.livejournal.com]

It's not the content that's bad--or the themes and tropes--it's the telling after showing everything we already know from watching 2 1/2 hours of it.

[(Anonymous)]

In the Sondheim/Shevelove adaptation of Aristophanes "The Frogs" it is "Fear No More" from "Cymberline" that Shakespeare uses to defeat Shaw in the contest of playwrights. It's a wonderful setting of one of Shakespeare's most famous lyrics and I'm sorry that (or one of the many settings of that song done over the years) couldn't have been used. Instead, oddly, the words are chanted.

All productions involve a series of choices. Lamos, the director made some good ones early on but the second half of the show seemed to get the better of him. I've recently been listening to the Arkangel CD of the
"Winter's Tale" also a late "problem play" which, like "Cymbeline" combines a serious first half with a pastoral and seemingly unrelated middle portion but pulls off a successful surprise ending with its "living statue" revelation.

Maybe in the works of much produced and discussed artists like Shakespeare people have a tendency to gravitate to the marginal works. These tend to be the plays one discovers later on, ones that defy successful production, that are interesting as much for their flaws as their strengths.

The late romances are called "problem plays" as much for interpretive problems as for production difficulties. Motivation is often difficult to fathom. I did have a feeling that somewhere along the way Shakespeare lost interest in this work.

Rick Bowes