{"id":868,"date":"2014-04-12T00:37:44","date_gmt":"2014-04-11T23:37:44","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/performancemonkey\/?p=868"},"modified":"2014-04-12T00:37:44","modified_gmt":"2014-04-11T23:37:44","slug":"silence-by-shakespeare","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/performancemonkey\/2014\/04\/silence-by-shakespeare.html","title":{"rendered":"Silence by Shakespeare"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"Wheeldon<\/a><\/p>\n

The challenge with basing a ballet on Shakespeare isn\u2019t, oddly, watching the words fall away. That\u2019s a given. It\u2019s how you mine the silences, the telling moments in which ambiguities cluster and on which the story turns. Christopher Wheeldon\u2019s fascinating new ballet (for the Royal Ballet and the National Ballet of Canada) of The Winter\u2019s Tale<\/em><\/a> \u2013 the first recorded of that brilliantly strange late play \u2013 has frustrations but often responds in intensely ways to a story which turns on what isn\u2019t clear, which gallops or soars leaving\u00a0prosaic in its wake.<\/p>\n

\"Richard<\/a>

Richard III as spider: Antony Sher’s drawing from The Year of the King<\/p><\/div>\n

Actors\u2019 bodies attempt to fall in line with their mouths, but dancers can embody metaphor without embarrassment. When Antony Sher seized on the image of Richard III as a \u2018bottled spider\u2019, he memorably deployed crutches, a roiling prosthetic back, looming shadows. Edward Watson<\/a> portrays Leontes\u2019 unforeseen spiral into the irrational without accessories. Without warning the king becomes convinced that he\u2019s a cuckold, and compares this \u2018knowledge\u2019 to an envenomed spider lurking in his drink \u2013 \u2018I have drunk, and seen the spider.\u2019 In Watson\u2019s version, his madly capering hand, fingers ascuttle, takes on a life of its own, spreads infected jitters through his body like a toxin through the bloodstream. His body becomes a stranger to itself \u2013 his fists pummel his head, his feet paw the floor like hooves, something inhuman possesses him.<\/p>\n

\"Edward<\/a>

Edward Watson as Leontes Photo: Johan Persson<\/p><\/div>\n

Important wordless things that happen in this play \u2013 such as whatever unspoken thing tips Leontes over the edge. Shakespeare offers a bald stage direction (Hermione \u2018takes Polixenes\u2019 hand\u2019) and suddenly the king husband is all, \u2018Too hot, too hot!\u2019 Wheeldon (pictured top in rehearsal by Johan Persson<\/em>) finds a moment of potent intimacy \u2013 as Hermione\u2019s baby kicks, and she presses first her husband\u2019s hand, then his friend\u2019s, to her belly.<\/p>\n

When I interviewed Lauren Cuthbertson<\/a> during rehearsals last month, the moment was slightly, but crucially, different. \u2018We\u2019ve all been dancing together,\u2019 she explained, \u2018and I feel the baby kick. I turn to Polixenes, just because I happen to be at that angle, and say, \u201cOh, feel the kick.\u201d Then I say it to Leontes \u2013 suddenly there\u2019s a freeze, and you see what\u2019s going on in his mind.\u2019 The reversal means that there\u2019s no ambiguity about her intention \u2013 but the picture of the two men, each pressing a palm on the heavily pregnant belly, is compact with an uneasy intimacy. It suggests what Raphael Lyne, in his study of Shakespeare\u2019s late work<\/a>, describes as \u2018spare energy\u2019 \u2013 often in a sexual context \u2013 that spills over the romances, giving moments such as this a \u2018disproportionate intensity.\u2019<\/p>\n

Zenaida Yanowsky<\/a> finds something equally powerful in Paulina, the abused queen\u2019s dauntless defender. There\u2019s a comic note in what I often think is my very favourite Shakespeare character \u2013 she nags on the side of the righteous \u2013 which the ballet doesn\u2019t attempt. But there\u2019s also a sacramental force in this woman who gathers the tale\u2019s unknotting into her keeping \u2013 ushering the fallen Hermione away, keeping her hidden for 16 years, stoking and soothing Leontes\u2019 remorse until she is ready to reunite them. There\u2019s a realistic explanation to her rough magic, but such behaviour leaves naturalism far behind (\u2018It is required\/ You do awake your faith\u2019) \u2013 in this semi-pagan theology, Paulina takes on a priestly air, which Yanowksy rives into her body from the beginning. Her albatross arms beat with sorrow and resolve; she arches her back and lurches forward as if burdened by mysteries which she will only gradually reveal.<\/p>\n

These are things that a performance of the play would struggle to match. There are other things that Wheeldon doesn\u2019t manage. Perhaps he didn\u2019t have time \u2013 making a vast new ballet, without the benefit of theatrical previews \u2013 or simply he didn\u2019t see them. His courtly first-act corps de ballet is not just dull but uncharacterised. What kind of regime is this? A formal court on the brink of tyranny? A cosy household unprepared for disaster? I love the quote (where does it come from?) that playing a king does not depend on how the monarch behaves, but on how everyone else treats him. These wafting couples don\u2019t treat Watson like a ruler, but like a ballet principal \u2013 decorously getting out of his way, filling in the background. Only Yanowksy invests him with authority \u2013 when she raises an indignant hand, remembers who he is and drops into a reluctant curtsey (later she won\u2019t hold back, and we register the shift).<\/p>\n

A bardhead should probably be barred from Shakespeare ballet. The urge to lament lost moments is too strong. I truly regretted the rushed end to Act One: not simply an underwhelming bear from puppeteer Basil Twist, but more the shepherd\u2019s too-brief discovery of the baby (here, a creepy animatronic doll waving its waxen limbs). You need a moment to register that the story\u2019s course is turning from disaster to repair \u2013 a beat equivalent to the shepherd\u2019s line, which slays me every time, \u2018Thou met\u2019st with things dying, I with things newborn.\u2019 Frozen hope begins to run again.<\/p>\n

\"The<\/a>

The opening of Act II of The Winter’s Tale (Royal Ballet)<\/p><\/div>\n

Wheeldon\u2019s second act (act four of the play) is the most successful as ballet. Indeed, it\u2019s pretty much a triumph. It\u2019s the Bohemian sheep-shearing festival, which Bob Crowley sets around a vast and gloriously verdant tree \u2013 burstingly green from topmost branch to root, and hung with the community\u2019s glinting tokens. Joby Talbot\u2019s music here is richly unexpected, an invented folk tradition. As he explains in a programme interview, he assembles a \u2018broken consort\u2019 of \u2018a bansuri (a type of Indian flute), dulcimer, accordion and some exotic percussion instruments.\u2019 The score has rich, shadowy texture, as well as rambunctious energy, and lets the dancers wheel and leap. The opening moments \u2013 in which Sarah Lamb\u2019s Perdita dances in solitary gravity to a haunting bansuri melody (feelingly played by Eliza Marshall<\/a>), while Steven McRae\u2019s besotted Prince Florizel watches from afar \u2013\u00a0form surely\u00a0the most beautiful single scene in recent ballet. Time holds its breath and quivers with delight.<\/p>\n

One character is decisively silenced in this version \u2013 Autolycus the travelling scam-artist, who fleeces everyone at the shearing. Wheeldon cuts him altogether \u2013 but his quick-thinking momentum remains in Florizel, who gets to be a more decisive, less entitled prince than usual, while his unscrupulous manoeuvres inform the score\u2019s dark places.<\/p>\n

Wheeldon\u2019s last act returns us to Leontes\u2019 court \u2013 where the grieving king nestles his head in Paulina\u2019s hands, entreating her to carry his skull full of sorrows<\/a>. The play\u2019s final silence \u2013 one which most directors ignore, and only a few mine for discomfort \u2013 is Hermione\u2019s. When she is revealed as alive, she speaks just once, to her newfound daughter. Her husband is effusive, but she says nothing to him. Wheeldon gives the couple a pas de deux, while everyone else sidles out to allow them some privacy, but he doesn\u2019t quite nail why. Is harmony restored? Will scar tissue mar their marriage? In any event, when everyone returns, Hermione focuses on Perdita, and mother and daughter leave together. Paulina has to usher Leontes out after them, and may get her wish (denied her in the play) to lament her own losses like an aged turtle dove on a withered bough, \u2018till I am lost.\u2019<\/p>\n

I left the ballet unresolved \u2013 torn between its insights and its absences. 24 hours on, I\u2019m still thinking about it \u2013 wanting to see it again, hoping to see it grow.<\/p>\n

The Winter’s Tale <\/em>is at the Royal Opera House, London until 1 May, and will also be screened in cinemas<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Follow David at @mrdavidjays<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The challenge with basing a ballet on Shakespeare isn\u2019t, oddly, watching the words fall away. That\u2019s a given. It\u2019s how you mine the silences, the telling moments in which ambiguities cluster and on which the story turns. Christopher Wheeldon\u2019s fascinating new ballet (for the Royal Ballet and the National Ballet of Canada) of The Winter\u2019s […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":872,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_genesis_hide_title":false,"_genesis_hide_breadcrumbs":false,"_genesis_hide_singular_image":false,"_genesis_hide_footer_widgets":false,"_genesis_custom_body_class":"","_genesis_custom_post_class":"","_genesis_layout":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[30,60,61,32,34],"class_list":{"0":"post-868","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-uncategorized","8":"tag-ballet","9":"tag-christopher-wheeldon","10":"tag-edward-watson","11":"tag-shakespeare","12":"tag-theatre","13":"entry"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/performancemonkey\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/868","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/performancemonkey\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/performancemonkey\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/performancemonkey\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/performancemonkey\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=868"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/performancemonkey\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/868\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/performancemonkey\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/872"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/performancemonkey\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=868"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/performancemonkey\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=868"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/performancemonkey\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=868"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}