[In the following excerpt, Clapp admires Nicholas Hytner's 2001 modern-dress staging of The Winter's Tale at London's National Theatre. According to the critic, Hytner's contemporary interpretation was underscored by a striking thematic contrast between the monochrome, bureaucratic Sicilian court and the anti-establishment Bohemia.]

Nicholas Hytner has been widely talked of as a contender for the directorship of the National Theatre. His production of The Winter's Tale should boost his chances. It's a dashing, illuminating occasion which deals boldly with the play's swoops from misery to merriment. It's enough to give modern-dress Shakespeare a good name.

The Winter's Tale used to be considered a ‘problem’ play, but that hasn't deterred recent directors: Hytner's is the fifth production I've seen in four years. Consciousness of the millennium may have given lustre to this account of a new golden era being bred out of a frozen past, but it hasn't dissolved the play's difficulties: it's hard to picture with equal vividness the bilious jealousy of old Sicily and the springiness of young Bohemia.

Hytner's solution is to treat the play with beady realism. His contrasting versions of contemporary life suggest Establishment and drop-out, old order and New Age, Windsor and Spencer. In Ashley Martin-Davis's expressive design, the Sicilian court—a sleek, monochrome box—is peopled by sycophants in grey suits, something like mafiosi, something like public schoolboys. The abandoning of Perdita is unusually upsetting. On the point of leaving her (whimpering in her basket) in the wild, Geoffrey Beevers's Antigonus tests the temperature of the milk in her bottle. As Paulina, Deborah Findlay croons and clucks to the infant as if she were standing on the pavement looking into a pram. She does so without once losing the beat of the verse. Findlay, always subtle and always substantial, gives the outstanding performance of the production: she's never merely a shrew or simply a visionary.

Hytner's Bohemia is an explosion of colour: Glastonbury-cum-Woodstock, with no morris-dance romping or unfunny clowns, no yokels and no wenches. In front of lush hills and bright tents, a bloke does tai chi, and a child with her face painted like a cat scampers. The stage is wreathed in smoke. The general amiability has more to do with dope than with simplicity: no damage is done to Shakespeare's verse when your ‘unusual weeds’ can be taken to refer not only to Perdita's Bo-Peep costume but also to the huge spliff on which her partner is drawing. The character of Autolycus is vibrantly projected by Phil Daniels as a magnetic musician and rapper who looks like Keith Richards on a particularly wizened morning.

Of course, there are peculiarities in the updating. Why would the jealous Leontes wait days for his messengers to bring news about his wife's fidelity from Delphi when he could surely have paged the Oracle? And there are deficiencies which may right themselves. The young lovers are wooden principal boy and girl figures. Though Alex Jennings's Leontes is compelling as he tumbles from disquiet to disfiguring rage (he really seems to thicken his features, to grow ugly in anger), he doesn't as yet rely sufficiently on his effortless skill in conveying the restrained cool and telling gesture.

But there are no imperfections in the wonderful last scene—in which the statue of Hermione comes to life. Rick Fisher's lighting makes Claire Skinner's ethereal queen look totally marmoreal; pinking her up, he breathes blood into her. And the final moment is perfectly judged: mother and daughter are left wrapped around each other in a pool of light; the men have gone; darkness is all around them. Reconciliation is enclosed by sadness.