Sam Mendes’s Winter’s Tale is a Disappointing Take on Shakespeare

Over fifty candles adorn the dimly lit pre-show stage, aptly setting an eerie mood.

This aura is soon reinforced by the first line in Sam Mendes’s production of The Winter’s Tale at the Brooklyn Academy of Music. But while the visual aesthetic is stunning, the performance itself fails to ever match the emotional intensity of its surroundings.

Known both to scholars and thespians as one of the “problem plays,” The Winter’s Tale is marked by thematic complications and a convoluted storyline. Most productions choose to portray the first three acts as tragedy and the last two as comedy, creating what many theatergoers have perceived historically as an uneven theatrical experience. These difficulties have the potential to be overcome—but, despite a talented cast and a renowned director, this new production is unable to find a proper balance between the different segments of the play and succumbs to the perils of one of Shakespeare’s most difficult texts.

Several of Mendes’s directorial choices are conceptually provocative: he has Mamillius—Leontes’s ill-fated son—remain on stage through his sickness, silently observing the unfolding of his father’s anger. He allows Polixenes, Leontes’s friend and King of Bohemia, to mingle ambiguously with Hermione, Leontes’s wife, while reclining upon cushions at the center of the stage.

Several other rather controversial choices also serve to provoke the audience, such as the rogue Autolycus’s use of a cross or a dance constructed entirely around the phallic use of balloons. Yet these choices are simply put forth without follow-through, never adding to the overall construction of the story. They end up mirroring the unstable nature of the text itself and never challenging the audience after the initial shock value.

More troubling, though, is the sense one gets that Mendes spent so much time working on developing appealing concepts that he forgot to fully form the play’s characters. Morven Christie’s take on Perdita, for example, is painfully one-note. Her petty resilience might befit a Juliet, but she lacks the innocence necessary for her role in this play. Josh Hamilton’s portrayal of Polixenes is also dull, displaying no feeling whatsoever, as he recites his lines as if reading them from a script.

Worst of all is Simon Russell Beale’s Leontes, who appears not as an irrational, raging king but rather as an irritating, paranoid nudnik. His relationship with Hermione is never established—while we can see him as a father, we never view him as a husband. As a result, the play’s very foundation is not established, and although the powerful ending sequence with the awakening of Hermione’s statue is brilliantly conceived and executed, it finds no basis in the beginning of the production.

To put it briefly, Mendes’s The Winter’s Tale seems unpolished, with actors going for cheap laughs and turning serious lines into mere comic remarks. Still, the play has some redeeming qualities: the Old Shepherd (Richard Easton) and his son (Tobias Segal) have a wonderful comedic elegance. Ethan Hawke’s guitar-wielding Autolycus is constantly entertaining and perhaps the most consistent part of the entire production.

Despite these entertaining factors, though, Mendes’s production falls well short of the haunting goal set forth at the play’s beginning. By the time the production becomes interested in exploring the challenging emotional content of the text—somewhere deep in the final act—it’s too late. Emblematic of the entire production’s lack of care, Mendes’s failure to even fulfill the play’s famous stage direction forces us to create the moment ourselves—we exit the theater pursued only by the memory of a production whose potential was never realized.