[In the following review, Jays asserts that Gregory 1999 Doran's Royal Shakespeare Company rendering of The Winter's Tale was a “supremely intelligent production, lucid in every detail” and notes that Antony Sher gave a powerful performance as Leontes.]

If actors can be auteurs, then Antony Sher, along with Fiona Shaw, is the supreme example in British theatre, encouraging productions prismed through his interpretation. In Gregory Doran's absorbing RSC production of The Winter's Tale, Sher helps us stare through the weak-hinged mind of King Leontes, who suspects his wife and friend of adultery. There is no cause, no cause, but we see the walls close in on him, hear amplified whispers of prurient imaginings. Sher uses his curious quality of distant amiability, an intimacy that refuses to catch fire, to drag us through the precipitous adversity of the play's first [half].

Sher's gift has been to embody metaphor—Richard III's dazzling spider, Tamburlaine's pumped-up hubris—but has often sounded bland, as if cowed by received pronunciation. Not here, where his pinched voice trembles on the high-wire. Rather than playing distraction, he is all explanation, sharing with us the clotted syntax and barbed knots of verse from which spars of piercing clarity emerge—“I am a feather for each wind that blows”; “I have drunk and seen the spider”. The stiff, uncomfortable statesman squeezes frenzy in his barrel chest, and when his poise shatters he shakes his head like a tormented lion. He grasps Hermione by the throat, snarls at his “bed-swerver”.

There is no explanation (although Sher diagnoses a condition called “morbid jealousy”), but the production provides voluptuous tokens of innocence on which his raven mind can swoop. Wife and friend share a gentle waltz to a tune (by Ilona Sekacz) so dreamy and thoughtless that it becomes unbearable, until the king scratches at the gramophone. Alexandra Gilbreath's lustrous and staggeringly pregnant Queen Hermione has the most entrancing soft voice, but Leontes prickles at its velvet brush of intimacy. He rejects the maternal blanketing she offers—indeed, he recoils from touch.

Sher makes Leontes' insanity primly rational: he searches through Hermione's reticule, sniffs her scarf for evidence. Later, sicker, he wanders the court unkempt and dressing-gowned, hands paddling the air and clutching at transparency. The king convinced by shadows shrinks to a blot on the floor. Only when told his wife and son are dead do his sore red eyes finally downfall tears, he retches with grief and is led off like an infant.

The production is set early this century, at the dwindling of a dynasty—Hapsburg, perhaps, or Romanov—who have inbred into infirmity; Leontes' sallow son and heir is a sickly waif, confined to a wheelchair. Robert Jones designs sharply receding walls (exit-crammed for disconcerting disappearance), ceilings swagged with stifling silks, furniture heavy in silver and plush. This is a court that stands on ceremony, flunkeys frozen in waxwork obeisance as Leontes rages around them.

Even in airless interiority, clouds wheel across the set. Ominous with thunder, they also prefigure circling time as the action leaps 16 years and turns to ripe summer. Antigonus has, famously, exited pursued by a bear while abandoning the infant princess Perdita, and the shepherd who discovers her—“Thou met'st with things dying, I with things new-born”—most beautifully marks the cusp. Antigonus (Jeffrey Wickham) emerges from the silk that engulfed him to propel us forward, and Emily Bruni, who sickened as the invalid prince, is reborn as a forceful, tumbling Perdita.

This aptness typifies Doran's supremely intelligent production, lucid in every detail. The evening brims with tenderness and distress, utterly involving. Despite a hostile press that has decided the RSC needs stars (the National's calamitous Antony and Cleopatra might warn them off), more important is an alert ensemble, and The Winter's Tale assembles a strong company, including Estelle Kohler's sleek and fierce Paulina, Christopher Brand's charming dunderhead and Myra McFadyen's stroppy shepherdess. Like Adrian Noble's magical version of The Tempest, now at the Barbican, this is far from radical Shakespeare—Doran ignores the dark potential of the first world war looming from his setting—but is beautifully achieved.

The cast uncoils into sheep-shearing festivities, no scrubbed Arcadians but mucky and sweaty among their piled-up bales and pulleys. Back at Leontes' court, we find the king a Tolstoyan penitent, squatting over his Bible. He has given away all the furniture—dust and paper crumple across bare floors. Sher's ice-splintered voice is warmer, furred with regret and wonder and, though it would be too tempting to conflate his journey with Leontes' (a cold virtuoso redeemed by heartfelt humility), he grows into his most generous performance yet.