[In the following review, Tucker praises Mike Alfreds's 2001 Globe Theatre production of Cymbeline as a “sprightly, well-paced production.”]

Cymbeline offers an acting company a formidable challenge. Not only is its plot convoluted, but many playgoers find its apparent hero, Posthumus, reprehensible. In the throes of jealousy (created by the lies of the cynical Iachimo), Posthumus believes that his beloved Imogen is untrue and orders his servant to murder her. In fact some critics have judged their apparent inability to like Posthumus as the play's crippling fault. Despite these potential dramatic shoals, the Globe Theatre presented a sprightly, well-paced production that, on the afternoon I watched it, was surely an audience-pleaser.

Director Mike Alfreds departs from conventional stagecraft and sets out on what he terms “an adventure in story telling.” Instead of beholding a large cast in Elizabethan costume, the audience encounters only eight actors (six men and two women) and two musicians. All are clad in similar white tunics, trousers, and shoes. One is reminded of a Noh-inspired experimental drama by W. B. Yeats, and experimental the production is. For the cast members are given the chance to showcase their acting talents by doubling, tripling, and even quadrupling their roles!

Although all cast members do well in switching on-stage personalities, the headlines belong to the Globe's artistic director, Mark Rylance, who doubles as Posthumus and as the young man's rival and boorish enemy Cloten (a pairing presumably suggested by the episode of Cloten's donning the clothing of Posthumus). Rylance's Posthumus is loving, sincere, not easily misled, and remorseful enough because of having uttered his decree of death that we can rejoice when he and Imogen are reunited. His Cloten, however, is an oafish and not unsympathetic comic bully. Without makeup Rylance morphs from hero to heel and back again, giving the audience a sense of beholding different actors. Thrusting back his shoulders, comically swaggering, adopting a boorish voice, Rylance incarnates a Cloten that gains more applause than his Posthumus and presents one of the few instances of an actor upstaging himself. Jane Arnfeld provides us with a beguiling, sympathetic Imogen, and Abigal Thaw, in her main role as the evil queen, offers us a formidable villainness.

Despite the production's engaging novelty, its departures from customary dramaturgy are not altogether successful. Although at times the cast takes pains to dissipate audience confusion by renaming the roles they recurringly assume, I suspect that a person unfamiliar with the play or who had perhaps not read it for a decade would be at times confused by the fast and incessant identity switchings. Then, too, the cast's nondescript clothing is not fully appropriate for a play which relies so much upon disguisings and specific costumes to achieve its effect. For instance, Cloten's wearing his rival's clothing as he sets out to rape Imogen, in retaliation for her rejecting him, suggests that on some level he and Posthumus are similar, and Posthumus himself provides symbolic depth to the play as he disguises himself as a Roman soldier and as a British peasant.

But these criticisms are minor. The Globe's Cymbeline offers a memorable afternoon.