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.