The Winter’s Tale

Black Box Theatre, Galway ***

THE KINGDOMS of Sicily and Bohemia are closely related in one of Shakespeare’s last plays, ruled over by two mutually besotted kings, but, we are assured, there are great differences betwixt them. To prove the point, the play judders through its gear-change when the action shifts between these locations, the first an urbane and stuffy court, the second a heedless and pastoral idyll. Like baffled tourists we encounter utterly different atmospheres and currencies: in Bohemia, you exchange tragedy for comedy.

Originally staged in 2005 (when it visited the Dublin Theatre Festival), Edward Hall’s production for his all-male Propeller company is here vigorously revived for a pairing with Henry V, making no apology for the play’s genre-hopping sensibilities. The intense jealousy that sets the plot in motion is sudden and thinly summoned – like Othello without Iago – and though Sicily’s consumed Leontes (Robert Hands) will bring about the deaths of his son and his wife, and the banishment of his newborn daughter, here nobody is beyond saving. The motivations are elemental, but the form is erratic, as though Shakespeare, at the end of his career, wanted to experiment with the generic conventions of theatre while bringing things back to basics. (It also makes one fugitive reference to The Beatles’ White Album, both arch and apt.) Beginning with a Sicilian court woozy with wine and as silver-coated as Andy Warhol’s Factory, Hall’s production follows the play’s leapfrog logic towards a bacchanalian-bright Bohemia, whose sheep-shearing festival now resembles an acid trip through Glastonbury.

Rather than try to reconcile those tonal lurches, Hall gleefully accentuates them. His ensemble’s approach, lucid, fresh and witty, is to serve as a flavour-enhancer, which can make our time in Sicily feel monochrome and wearingly interminable, while Bohemia is so entertainingly lysergic – with Tony Bell’s ad-libbing rock-star Autolycus fronting a supergroup of musical sheep – it’s a shame we ever have to leave it.

Hall does locate a folk tale’s continuity by making Leontes’s young son, a pyjama-clad Ben Allen, the stage manager of the drama. That allows for an elegant, if less than spectacular, solution to Shakespeare’s craziest stage direction (“Exit, pursued by a bear”), but by casting Allen as the figure of Time and the exiled daughter Perdita too, he cuts deeper into Shakespeare’s curious conceit. Like the play’s redemptive story, that gesture dares to juxtapose innocence and experience: with enough warming imagination, even a bitter tragedy can be magically reversed.

Until Jul 28