The Tale of Cymbeline
by William Shakespeare
Georgia Shakespeare Festival, Atlanta
(in repertory through August, Year 3, with Much Ado about Nothing and The School for Wives)
Carp, carp. That's all I do after seeing a GSF production. Well, not this time. Cymbeline is simple fun, and I have a simple suggestion for doubling your pleasure in it. Somewhere in Act 1, it could come fairly near the beginning, you'll see something happen on stage that strikes your funnybone. Laugh. I know, you are failing to show proper respect, but Trust Me. You and the others will have a better time once the ice is broken.
The audience member who, in the post-show "talkback" session, described the play as "Plan Nine from Ancient Britain" was wicked and should have been stifled. The text takes a quite serious subject, a passage from the Roman conquest of Britain, and gives it a treatment that could be weighty. King Cymbeline had two sons, but they went missing as toddlers. His household now comprises his daughter Imogen, his new wife and her son Cloten (rhymes with "cotton"). The queen tries to make a match so that her boy can succeed the old man on the throne, but Imogen has already married a gentleman named Posthumus. The king banishes Posthumus, who goes to Rome, makes some unsavory friends, and comes to believe his wife has betrayed him. Imogen does what any Shakespeare heroine would, puts on trousers and goes to live in the forest. The tale ends happily, but not before episodes of mistaken identity, poaching, bloody battle and counterfeited death.
Director and designer Nancy Keystone may have allowed the set to take control of some scenes. It contained hundreds of yards of unbleached muslin and a gadget like the starter's gate at a racetrack, and it was vast. The medium-sized cast had to fill the space between Row A and the loading dock, and as a consequence their movements occasionally seemed slow—simply because it took them a long time to cover the ground. But I said I didn't want to carp.
John Ammerman and Carolyn Cook, as the king and queen, provided a solid basis for the action. (Um, was it the evil landlady in Thoroughly Modern Millie who did her hair up with chopsticks, though?) Courtney Patterson as Imogen and Joe Knezevich as Cloten and Posthumus gave fine performances (he got a pretty good workout). A strong Allen O'Reilly played the servant Pisanio, who ran some of the deceptions and prevented others from working.
A professional cast can sometimes give you this: They will play the material straight even when you in the audience think it is funny. Amateurs, I know from hard experience, will respond to the laughs with mugging and shifts of timing and so ruin the show. It's practically universal, and a play with as many wacky moments as Cymbeline would quickly collapse if a community theater cast got hold of it. The GSF people didn't succumb; even when the director told Guiderius and Arviragus (Daniel May, Damon Boggess) to steal the apparently defunct Imogen's shoes, they played the scene straight. I'll go further: Even when Bruce Evers, playing a soothsayer, came on in a polychromatic crusader's tent of a robe and a wig like an albino lion's pelt, they played the scene straight. Let the audience make decisions about what to laugh at; there is nothing deadlier than the actor whose ear is turned outward for laughs, not toward the others onstage.
Now this is not to say that Cymbeline isn't funny, just that the company deserves credit for keeping their composure in the face of rolling laughter from us in the house. You know, there's a relevant text in Miss Manners' Guide to Excruciatingly Correct Behavior: A reader told of a lady at a party whose garment, as she leaned over the guacamole, abruptly ceased to confine her person. The reader asked whether it was more polite to laugh, as her husband did, or pretend not to notice, as she did. Miss Manners replied that not to laugh would be as much as to say this was what you expected, that it probably happens to that lady all the time. If you saw this play and failed to laugh at the building complications and the 15 or 20 fast-paced revelations and reversals that end the evening, folks would think you were showing embarrassment at some ineptness of the playwright or the cast.
So go see Cymbeline and enjoy both the seriousness of the story and the outrageousness of the writing. And do give way to that impulse to chuckle.
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Cymbeline