William Shakespeare’s The Winter’s Tale can also be interpreted as a bitter fairy tale about the excesses of power—the madness of a vengeful, then repentant King, which spawned another equally vengeful one—and the possibilities for reconciliation that does not forget or erase what has happened. There is no modernization in the beautiful staging by director Jared McNeill for Teatro Due in Parma (a production by Fondazione Teatro Due), but we can glimpse references in the text (great classics always question us), a contemporaneity that our dark times call into question.
That said, The Winter’s Tale—written in 1611, when the poet was nearing the end of his career—is above all a fascinating fairy tale, with a tragic, comedic, and pastoral plot. It is a magical and contradictory play, yet concrete and coherent: an account or parable of two faces of the human soul, captured as it travels from Sicily to Bohemia, from winter to summer, in a confusion of eras serving a tragedy that unfolds into a comedy. It is difficult to summarize due to the complex and often inconsistent—though coherent within the poetic imagination—vicissitudes of the narrative and its numerous characters.
The story is constructed through a series of plot twists. Leontes, King of Sicily, feels a profound jealousy growing within him towards his wife Hermione, who is about to give him a second child, because he believes she is betraying him with Polixenes, King of Bohemia, his best friend until then—how can one not see the uncontainable wrath of Lear and the unfounded jealousy of Othello here? Leontes even wants to have his rival killed, who, warned in time, manages to escape Sicily. Hermione is imprisoned, then made to believe by the king that she is dead, and their daughter Perdita is abandoned on a beach to be devoured by vultures but is saved by a shepherd. The fleeing royal friend, therefore, forced to flee, and she tortured, tried, deprived of the child in her womb, imprisoned until she dies (as it seems).
In Bohemia, sixteen years later, the same wrath of Leontes takes hold of the King of that country when faced with a true love between his heir son and a peasant girl, who turns out to be Perdita. There will be an encounter between the old and the new avenger, and the final recognition, Leontes’ repentance, his identification of his daughter among statues that come to life—that of Hermione—the return to life of people believed dead. Those who will not return to the world, however, is little Mamillius, Leontes’ firstborn son, encountered at the beginning of the story, a child of precocious intelligence and adult sadness, destined to disappear in the most tragic moment of the story.
The final joy, with weddings, is not, however, carefree: this world, marked by the memory of many errors and repentances, is immersed in melancholy. And where the happy ending is a shore of fortunate landing.
Having collaborated with Peter Brook for over ten years and being a profound connoisseur of the Anglo-Saxon theatre, director, actor, and author McNeill signs this production with exemplary clarity, in service of the text. Within a set of undefined neoclassical design—composed of simple cubes that, disassembled, displaced, and overlapped, shape environments and situations, with veiled white statues on the sides, then magical oriental carpets to create a sea storm—follows a more explosive and colorful setting where a polar bear in an elegant dark suit singing New York, New York erupts (while chasing one of the characters with a club to devour it); a minstrel with a guitar—the courtier-rogue Autolycus—along with a swarm of bucolic and comedic characters who burst from the stalls to the proscenium, bringing the second part of the story to life before the closed red curtain. And it is the soundscape created by the music, from monochromatic minimalism, performed live by Claudio Scarabottini, that accompanies the emotional journey of the story, to which the lights of Stefano Bardelli and the costumes of Elisabetta Zinelli give visual substance.
All the actors play multiple roles with great commitment and interpretative richness: from the powerful—at times excessive—Leontes of Luca Cicolella, to Alessandro Burzotta, Diletta Masetti, Salvo Drago, Francesca Gabucci, Irene Paloma Jona, Nicola Lorusso, Felice Montervino, Salvo Pappalardo.
