Cymbeline review – hip thrusts and gender inversions enliven this tricky romcom tragedy
Shakespeare’s early British monarch is reimagined as a queen heading a matriarchy – and overseeing the mother of all dysfunctional “blended” families. Her queer daughter, Innogen (Gabrielle Brooks), has married her girlfriend, Posthumus (Nadi Kemp-Sayfi) without Cymbeline’s permission. Her second husband, Duke (Silas Carson), is plotting against his wife and manoeuvring to line up his son, Cloten (Jordan Mifsúd), for the throne. Both parents are trying to get their children – step-siblings – to marry.
The production’s gender inversions are set amid Shakespeare’s melodrama, involving everything from poison plotting by the Duke to the kidnapping of royal children and Cymbeline’s war with Rome. Among it all, the matriarchy does not quite resonate in its significance or even feel especially revisionist, perhaps because the play’s prevailing themes speak of family relationships and parental responsibility over an examination of power – the latter is not prominently examined here.
It is suggested that the queen (Martina Laird) has cultural origins in another land, mainly through percussive music and song, although composer Laura Moody says that the music does not reference any one tradition but is a collection of global influences. This sound dominates, and is thrilling at times, with what seems like vocally experimental hums, cries, and bird-like tweets, along with music made from found objects such as stones, clay pots and glass bell cloches. But it has an abstract, generalised effect, floating as a concept, a little like the gender reversals, and does not quite transform the play’s meanings. The queen (Laird) is vaguely drawn, while the Duke is a cypher.
There are good things: the wager that the banished Posthumous makes with Iachimo (Pierro Niel-Mee), betting over Innogen’s faithfulness, brings a pronounced sense of predation in the bedroom scene (when Iachimo creeps into Innogen’s room while she sleeps). It shows coercive kissing and touching that seems orchestrated to conjure unease. But there is arguably less logic to a wager on female sexual fidelity, made by a female lover with a man; it contains its own violation, especially given Posthumus knows her wife to be queer.
Although Cymbeline was labelled a “tragedie” by Shakespeare, it has often been enacted as a wonky comedy-romance, and Jennifer Tang’s production plays up the humour, with hip-thrusts and double entendres that highlight the performance of hypermasculinity.
The set design by Basia Bińkowska is elegant, too, and the performances are sharp. But this is a tricky play to pull off because of its many (too many?) fevered components. Maybe it is lesser performed for good reason, or perhaps this production, full of inspired ideas, does not anchor them down enough. At almost three hours (on press night), it felt like a play trotting from one plot-turn to another to reach its exhausting end.
• At the Sam Wanamaker Playhouse, London, until 20 April.
