The Winter’s Tale review: A quixotic take that gives us two shows in one

Sean Holmes serves up silliness and wonder in the first production to use both spaces at Shakespeare’s Globe

A scene from ‘The Winter’s Tale’ at Shakespeare’s Globe, London, directed by Sean Holmes (©Tristram Kenton)

With theatre tickets getting ever more expensive, you’ve got to applaud director Sean Holmes for serving up what feels like at least two different shows in one. His quixotic take on The Winter’s Tale emphasises the disjointed nature of the play – part tragedy, part comedy – by splitting it across Shakespeare’s Globe’s two performance spaces. The psychologically intense first act, set in the Sicilian court, unfolds by candlelight in the gilded splendour of the Sam Wanamaker Playhouse. Then, the audience wraps up warm for a chilly but altogether more fun trip to pastoral Bohemia in act two. It’s the first time both spaces have been used in a single production, but it feels like more than a gimmick. It captures the sense of adventure, strangeness and spectacle found in Shakespeare’s late “romance” plays, which can’t be straightforwardly categorised in the way his earlier works can.

There’s a light sprinkling of the kind of whimsy Holmes is known for in act one, which turns into an extended dinner party with a series of increasingly surreal dishes unveiled from under cloches: ortolans (which the cast eat with napkins over their heads), bowls of dry ice, burgers in polystyrene packets. This court is clearly one presided over by a deranged, capricious king, and Sergo Vares’s airily detached performance as Leontes heightens that sense. Convinced his pregnant wife Hermione (a warm, voluble Bea Segura) is being unfaithful, he casts her out, shedding his finery and crouching on the dinner table like a cowering dog.

Still, it’s act two when the production really cuts loose: we meet Leontes’s estranged daughter at an outdoor bacchanal complete with multicoloured strings of lights, mullet-wearing shepherds and outbreaks of Mongolian throat-singing. The fraudster Autolycus is the unofficial master of ceremonies here: Ed Gaughan’s hackneyed but utterly hilarious turn is part Del Boy, part Fagin. “I’m a wrong ’un,” he cheerfully admits, fleecing the shepherds (geddit?) and then regaling them with ballads using plots cribbed from The Godfather and Breaking Bad. Holmes makes free with Shakespeare’s words here, getting ready laughs with ad-libs and pop culture references, as well as dance numbers that get the audience cavorting in the chilly night air.

After all that playtime, it feels like a shock to be called back inside for act three: presumably it’s the same shock that Leontes’s long-lost daughter Perdita (Jacoba Williams) feels when she’s called away from her rural idyll. And it’s also a bit of a disappointment that the staging of this play’s most notoriously odd moment (a statue coming to life) is handled in a fairly conventional way. The happy endings of Shakespeare’s plays can easily feel like a formality, loose ends neatly stitched in. That’s true here – except for a hint that Leontes’s jealous suspicions weren’t unfounded. This play is all about redemption, about what’s lost being joyfully regained, and Hermione and Leontes’s ambivalent reunion here undermines that. Still, if this show is missing a little heart, it’s full of enough silliness and wonder to light up the coldest winter’s night.

‘The Winter’s Tale’ runs at Shakespeare’s Globe, London, until 16 April