[In the following review of Mike Alfreds's stylized Cymbeline at the Globe in 2001, Shore praises the production's minimal cast and privileging of comic and ironic elements. Acknowledging some weaknesses in the play's final scene, the critic nevertheless deems this “a fine, bold staging” of one of Shakespeare's most difficult plays to successfully realize.]

Performances at the open-air Globe set in high relief those lines in which the Bard eyes the heavens. On the opening night of Cymbeline, for instance, Imogen's question “Hath Britain all the sun that shines?”, delivered as she contemplates exile overseas, drew rueful laughter from a sodden audience. Fittingly, the play dates from the period around 1609, when Shakespeare himself was preparing for a relocation of operations indoors, to the theatre at Blackfriars.

With its large cast, extravagant plotting and swift scene shifts between the British court, Rome and a rude cave in Wales, Cymbeline is a difficult play to stage successfully, whatever the weather. Dr Johnson raged against “the folly of the fiction, the absurdity of the conduct, the confusion of the names and manners of different times, and the impossibility of the events”, concluding that its “unresisting imbecility” was unworthy of his critical energies. Fortunately, at the Globe, the director, Mike Alfreds, takes its improbabilities in rather better part and revels in the story's baroque exorbitance. In order to do so, he has abandoned all pretensions to naturalism and stripped away superfluous visual detail. The stage is thus left bare but for a collection of gongs hung gamelan-like in a frame at the back; these and a variety of other percussion instruments are used to provide a suitably enchanting musical accompaniment to the play's fairy-tale action. Just six actors, identically dressed in white, share the twenty-two speaking roles, announcing the changes in scene (“Rome”) and narrating any other physical information essential to the plot (“Enter Imogen dressed as a boy”, says Jane Arnfield's Imogen as she steps back into the playing space, her appearance entirely unaltered). The battle between the Britons and the Romans is staged as a series of semi-comic human friezes; props are handed to the actors only when they are referred to in speech.

Such stylization works surprisingly well; it produces a kind of emotional distancing effect, with everything presented as if at one remove from reality, that seems well adapted to the spirit of the play. One of Cymbeline's most distinctive features is its repeated use of a particularly benign form of dramatic irony. The audience is always one step ahead of the characters on stage; for instance, we know that Imogen is not really dead, that Posthumus has not been beheaded, and so on. The result is that, although the play rehearses many of the central motifs from the great tragedies, in particular the theme of sexual jealousy (the “strange infection that falls into the ear”), they are here displayed as imitations of the real thing—spectres conjured by impermanent, comic misunderstanding. In Cymbeline, moral goodness is like a magnet that exercises an irresistible force over destiny.

The asceticism of Alfred's staging spurs the actors on to greater vividness and controlled exuberance in their own playing. The production is blessed with a particularly strong cast, who relish the challenge of multiple roles. Despite some outrageous mugging in the early scenes, Mark Rylance finds an unexpected pathos in Cloten (rather more so than in his Posthumus); John Ramm is excellent as Iachimo; and Arnfield makes for an affecting and acrobatic Imogen, although her use of a highly formalized repertoire of physical gestures occasionally seems out of place alongside the more relaxed playing style of her fellow actors.

Only in the final scene, in which twenty-four distinct plot “revelations” are made by twelve different characters in the space of 455 lines, do things begin to unravel. The cast throw themselves about the stage in an attempt to inhabit their several roles simultaneously, but, in front of a Globe audience that seems determined to see the funny side of everything, the ebullience begins to pall, and the production fails to achieve the quality of seriousness—and stillness—necessary to make sense of the finale. But in every other respect, this is a fine, bold staging that might have persuaded even Samuel Johnson that there was something of value in the play after all.