Cymbeline

Published Wednesday 30 May 2007 at 14:45 by Jason Best

Samuel Johnson famously dismissed Shakespeare’s late romance for its ‘unresisting imbecility’, but director Declan Donnellan and designer Nick Ormerod manage to impart a remarkable clarity to the play’s notoriously convoluted plot.

They do this by stripping the Barbican stage of unnecessary scenic clutter and turning it into a vast, cavernous space that proves, thanks to Judith Greenwood’s artful lighting, equally suited for intimate intrigue in the court of the play’s eponymous king or epic battles in the wilds of Wales.

Shakespeare’s story encompasses ancient Britain, classical Rome and even Renaissance Italy, but Cheek by Jowl’s production locates the action somewhere between the mid-20th century and the present.

So David Collings’ choleric Cymbeline wears a formal tailcoat and scarlet sash, while Gwendoline Christie’s imperious queen, a glacial blonde who towers over her husband, comes across as a mix of scheming trophy wife and fairytale evil stepmother.

Guy Flanagan’s Iago-like troublemaker Iachimo has touches of Eurotrash seducer and city slicker, but Jodie McNee gives a timeless quality to the chaste and innocent Imogen. Tom Hiddleston cleverly doubles as spoilt prince Cloten and exiled hero Posthumus, and the way he nimbly transforms from one character to another with the aid of raincoat and glasses is typical of the production’s fleetness of foot.

The staging stumbles a little in the second half, when the accumulation of breathtaking coincidences becomes too much even for Donnellan’s lucid direction, but for the most part this is an impressive attempt to find theatrical order in a supremely anarchic play.