[In the following review, Flanders presents a mixed review of Nicholas Hytner's 2001 production of The Winter's Tale at London's National Theatre. While Hytner's vision of a menacing, corporate Sicilia convincingly accentuated Leontes's paranoia, Flanders avers, the director lost control of his production with his free-wheeling interpretation of the Bohemia episodes.]

Nicholas Hytner has brought The Winter's Tale into the arctic wastes of the Olivier Theatre, and he fills it, and us, with warmth. With him is a cast of exceptional authority: Alex Jennings as Leontes, Claire Skinner as Hermione and, most sensationally, Deborah Findlay as Paulina.

As the play opens, we are tumbled directly into the action via some rather unnecessary cutting and reorganization; instead of two Lords of Bohemia and Sicilia setting the scene for us, Mamillius, dressed as Time, recites for his parents' friends at their penthouse drinks party. Leontes, it would appear, is the super-rich head of a high-tech corporation. The designer Ashley Martin-Davis has created a world that is grey and stark, sleek and groomed. Minimalist screens slide smoothly across the stage to create boxes in which the characters are imprisoned. Against them, Alex Jennings's ordinariness, his lack of lurking menace or obsessive compulsion makes his freefall into madness all the more horrifying. Leontes is the only Shakespearean creation to have no outside goad; his Iago is inside himself, and Jennings's sudden, roaring paranoia makes the maggots crawling in his soul shockingly visible.

Hermione faces a grey-toned Stalinist show trial, where her accuser is her judge. Leontes's two apparatchiks return from Delphos with the judgment of the oracle which is solemnly read out—oddly, as it had, in an earlier scene, apparently been faxed on ahead. That no one doubts the truth of the oracle in this ultra-modern world is one of the small incongruities that Hytner's modernization creates. Repression breeds deceit. After Hermione's collapse, her friend Paulina returns to announce her dead. In this contemporary production, there is little ambiguity, no question of a purely magical resurrection, despite Antigonus' later vision of Hermione's ghost. But with two actors of the calibre of Antigonus (Geoffrey Beevers) and Paulina, this is not a worry for long. Beevers carries off his now unfashionably dutiful role with dignity and weight; in this Gordon Gekko world he could easily have appeared a fool, and that he is genuinely mourned even after his tragicomic death is a tribute to the sincerity of the performance. Deborah Findlay deserves a review to herself. Her Paulina is sassy at the beginning, threatening as tragedy looms, and, finally, matures into the personification of an austere reproach, the conscience to a king.

This is not a winter's tale, but the winter's tale: the desolation of slate grey that Leontes creates around him. Bohemia is the obverse, that arcadia which Leontes' madness has destroyed, and Hytner is less secure in its summer sun. The Old Shepherd (movingly played by John Normington) is dressed to be ready, should a sudden episode of One Man and His Dog break out on stage; the sheep-shearing festival, that bucolic episode of joyous hospitality, is, depressingly, the raucous setting of Glastonbury, particularly late in the festival. Polixenes, looking for his son, is disguised as Prince Michael of Kent, and Autolycus (Phil Daniels) is a mix of Jimmy Savile and a used-car salesman. Any one of these ideas might have worked; all of them together are just a mess.

The busy-ness, the constant shift of view in particular, means that the energy usually brought to the pastoral by Autolycus is entirely subsumed. He is only one more eccentric in a land apparently teeming with oddities. And this is a shame, for Phil Daniels has much to give—had he less to do, had everything around him been simplified, he might have been remembered as one of the best Autolycuses of modern times. But he has a Bob Dylan impression, a rap number, a “Brush Up Your Shakespeare” variant, a preppy incarnation, a shell-suited persona. … One can only assume, sadly, that Hytner didn't trust his material.

And if you can't trust The Winter's Tale, what can you trust? The two halves, of destruction and redemption, of jealousy and penance, of winter and spring, encompass all that is worst, and best, in ourselves. Time turns over the hour-glass at the beginning of Act Four, reassuring us that we can undo what is done, and begin again.