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Covid-postponed production moves the play to the 1950s but lacks the inventiveness of the National’s recent Romeo and Juliet
This RSC production opens in a 20th-century Sicilia and modernises the play’s themes of paranoid leadership and patriarchal abuse in subtle yet powerful ways. The word “tyranny” sounds emphatic here, jumping out again and again and chiming with the postwar era in which it is situated – a 1950s Europe still riddled with fascism.
Directed by Erica Whyman and featuring the cast that was due to appear in the postponed 2020 stage production, Joseph Kloska plays King Leontes as a hysterical brute who is caught in the grip of high-pitched paranoia, his courtiers too mealy-mouthed to make a stand against his conspiracy theory that his “slippery” wife is having an affair with Polixenes (Andrew French). Only the fierce Paulina is brave enough to make a stand (“You’re liars, all”) and Amanda Hadingue’s impassioned performance is a highlight alongside Kemi-Bo Jacobs’s stoic, steely Hermione.
