[In the following review, Canby praises Ingmar Bergman's 1995 staging of The Winter's Tale at the Brooklyn Academy of Music, New York, for its lucid artistic vision that succeeded with minimal theatrical affectation.]

If you have any doubt about Ingmar Bergman's premier place in the international theater, you can't afford to miss his fine, quintessentially Bergman interpretation of The Winter's Tale, one of the last and strangest of Shakespeare's romantic comedies.

You haven't much time, though. The production, which opened at the Brooklyn Academy of Music on Wednesday night, is available for only two more performances, today and tomorrow at 8 P.M. It will be followed on Wednesday by the Bergman production of Madame de Sade, also part of the current citywide Bergman tribute.

The Winter's Tale fits gracefully into the Bergman canon, where devastating marital discord, the theme of so many of his films, tends to be far more convincing than the accommodations that lead to reconciliation. The production also resolutely avoids the current impulse, especially ubiquitous in London, to impose contemporary meanings on texts nearly 400 years old.

Mr. Bergman does outfit his tale with such anachronisms as a pistol, a motorcycle and costumes that suggest any of several centuries. But he doesn't otherwise tamper with Shakespeare in unruly ways. The production is set in the early 19th century, and opens and closes with a young woman's birthday celebration in a Swedish manor house. The play we see is The Winter's Tale as it is being put on by the guests as part of the festivities. That's about as far as he goes to bend the original.

There are no revolving platforms in this production. Avoided, too, are all stage tricks intended to beguile the eye and convince the audience that it's watching some lesser form of cinema. This Winter's Tale is simply and purely theatrical, a celebration of the art of the stage, beautifully acted by the members of the Royal Dramatic Theater of Sweden, where the production was initially staged.

Among other things, the production has not one but two bears, one brown, the other white. They aren't to be accepted as anything except actors wearing bear suits, which look as if they had been too long in an attic trunk. The brown bear is a comic interpolation. The white bear is the beast that figures in Shakespeare's best-known stage direction: “Exit, pursued by a bear.”

This bear, being polar, also more or less locates Mr. Bergman's vision of Shakespeare's settings of Sicily and Bohemia. They're now far closer to the chill of the Arctic Circle than to the reviving warmth of the Mediterranean sun. This may be why the play's dark first half, which usually stretches credulity, now has such emotional impact that the lighthearted conclusion seems more of a dream than Shakespeare possibly intended.

Mr. Bergman's Winter's Tale ends not with the promise of spring but with the forebodings of autumn. And no wonder.

At the start of the play, when Leontes, the king of Sicily, accuses his beloved Hermione of being unfaithful with Polyxenes, the king of Bohemia, the charges seem the delusion of a madman. For the play to proceed, however, the director, the actors and the audience must accept as rational Leontes's horrific decision to be rid of his wife and newborn daughter.

In most productions, these scenes are played with a kind of dutiful obedience to the greater good of the entire play. That is, without the emotional conviction that could dangerously undermine the gaiety of all that comes later, when the emphasis is on romantic young love, rural comedy and country pagaentry. Mr. Bergman takes his chances.

In this production, there is a furious, typically Bergman honesty when Leontes makes his accusations against Hermione, when she is put on trial and when their infant daughter Perdita is banished. In fact, there's so much honesty that the rest of the performance, which comes after intermission, seems to be marking time until the great, final recognition scene.

The play's comedy scenes, though enthusiastically performed, are not terribly funny. The attempts at updated rube humor (“‘What's up?’ said the man as he sat on a sword”) sound as if they had been stolen from an old production of Die Fledermaus. This sort of verbal horsing around is not helped if, as I did, you have to listen to the rather perfunctory English translation of the Swedish text through earphones.

It's the drama that carries this comedy, especially in the disciplined intensity of the performances by Pernilla August (you probably saw her in Fanny and Alexander) as Hermione, Borje Ahlstedt as Leontes and the beautiful, authoritative Bibi Andersson as Paulina, the faithful attendant to Hermione.

Mr. Bergman's staging is masterfully direct, plain and unfancified. It falters only in the recognition scene, which, as he directs it, seems to be an effort to avoid the way it has been played in every other production you have ever seen. His decisions are otherwise without fault.

Changes in location are indicated by one or two props, sometimes by screens. The trial scene is played entirely around, or on, a long wooden table, which is presided over by a judge in robes of orangey-scarlet color. This color, in its most pure shade, is also the color of Hermione's gowns, the rest of the costumes and décor being browns, olives and dark blue-greens.

When Mr. Bergman goes all out, as in the storm on the seacoast of Bohemia, he uses a few khaki-colored backdrops, a model of a tempest-tossed sailing ship, four people dressed to look like kelp-laden waves, and a man onstage who earnestly works a wind machine by hand. As Mr. Bergman rediscovers the dramatic heft in The Winter's Tale, he also reminds us of the satisfactions of theatrical artifice when it's kept small.

In this way, too, he allows the imagination to soar.