NIDA, 2013
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by Catherine Steele.
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Set upon a
series of tiered white planes, this Cymbeline
foregrounded Shakespeare’s jagged and uncompromising prose, his torturously
fractured speech-rhythms and borderline incomprehensible plot. Not because the
actors, all second-year acting students, were anything less than superb, but
simply because it is such a strange play. The actors carried the play with
aplomb, making the lines that extra bit clearer, doing their utmost in their
beautifully designed and tailored jackets and dresses and skirts to make the
play as believable, as real, as possible. One of his Romances, Cymbeline’s ending – another classic
revelatory ‘wonder-upon-wonder’ scene – can seem rather awkward and implausible
on the page. Here, under the direction of Tom Wright, the scene – indeed, the
production – was measured, carefully timed and beautifully judged; what could
have fallen over itself became moving, and the grace with which it was played
fed reversely back through the previous two-and-a-bit hours, leaving us drained,
ours brain fizzing as we tried to make sense of the whole crazy mad tale.
