[In the following review, Brustein provides a favorable notice of Ingmar Bergman's 1995 Brooklyn Academy of Music, New York, production of The Winter's Tale.]

Ingmar Bergman's production of The Winter's Tale recently played at the Brooklyn Academy of Music in repertory with his inspired Madame de Sade (which I reviewed during its last American appearance). Possibly reflecting the imbalances of the play, it is not one of Bergman's most brilliant productions, but nothing created by this master is ever less than compelling. Set around the turn of the century in a Swedish country home, The Winter's Tale is treated as one of the entertainments (another being a musical concert written by an expatriate Scandinavian composer) performed during the wedding celebration of the daughter of the house. This sets the action in the ballroom of a country estate and features considerable domestic horseplay in the mode of Smiles of a Summer Night—servants and masters flirting and cavorting, children posing with masks, a capella choruses, grouse shooting—somewhat at the expense of the focus of Shakespeare's text. Still, there is much that is freshly seen in Bergman's reading. For one thing, Leontes's insane jealousy over Hermione—which has always seemed like a pathological version of Othello's abuse of Desdemona—is now provided with some credible motivation. Hermione's graciousness toward Polixenes stops just short of coquetry, while he, in turn, can't keep his eyes or hands off her. Bergman mirrors the king's internal tumult in nature. An orange glow lights the sky as Leontes expresses his spastic rage toward his wife. Performed by Bergman's favorite actor, the heavyset Borje Ahlstedt, who played the goatish Claudius in Hamlet and a lubricious Peer Gynt, this Leontes roars like a maddened bull, mauling and shaking Camillo in his rage, then goring a court lady in full view of the court. (Ahlstedt's brutish Claudius also preferred to have sexual relations in public.) The rustic scenes between the clowns and Autolycus, padded with considerable comic interpolation, have an appealing Nordic heaviness to them, and Bergman does not underplay the erotic side of the Midsummer rituals. Unlike Stoppard, Bergman recognizes that humans possess animal appetites as well as intellectual curiosity. This knowledge makes for robust comedy, powerful drama and superior art.