The Winter’s Tale strides valiantly into the precarious yet all too irresistible terrain of “problem play”. It balances neurotic court life and absurd Boston Legal levels of psychological intensity with the casual absurdity of Bohemia, where inhabitants often take leave of their responsibilities and even, while “pursued by a bear”, the stage. Equally valiantly, the Cambridge University American Stage Tour packed their performance into a handful of suitcases and hopped across the Atlantic, to cover ten states and two thousand miles in the relative cultural void between the end of the Edinburgh Festival and the start of Freshers’ Week.

The plot starts off in the familiar guise of familial tragedy, only to lurch at times into pastoral comedy. Paranoid King decides loving Queen is unfaithful and callously discards their baby on the shores of Bohemia. He then struggles with sixteen solid years of guilt and remorse, as the baby is raised by a geriatric father, loved by a bland Prince, and finally re-united with her family in a crescendo of increasingly happy coincidences.

The eight actors morphed through various different garments and puppet masks to convey both placid court members and peculiar bumpkins. The disconnected sequence of the play and doubling of roles allowed for several impressive performances, and yet stopped the relationships between characters from building convincingly. Ed Martineau demonstrated an enormous range of acting ability with Leonides’ undulating emotions and the slapstick Old Shepherd, partly paralleled by Molly Goyer Gorman as the modest Hermione and the over-exaggerated Clown. Finally Owen Holland shone as the show-stealing Autolycus, strumming his way through Bohemia and conning shepherds and audience-members alike with confident charm.

The drab Edwardian elegance of the design subtly evoked the youthful mania and tea-stained tone of Arthur Rackham’s illustrations in the 1907 edition of Alice in Wonderland, giving a surprising unity. However, the clarity of the production, with minimal set and severe lighting to suggest space, placed great pressure on the play, forcing the quality of the language and the energy of the performances into sharp relief. This focus made a harmony between the earnest and the eccentric components almost impossible, while the direction was not always consistently equal to the curious demands of the text. This confident take on a lesser-performed piece had moments of both the sublime and the ridiculous, yet The Winter’s Tale remains a problematic play for cast and audience.

Monty Stagg