Cymbeline (26 page)

Garrick’s revival restored the play’s stage fortunes somewhat and his adaptation became the orthodox text over the next forty years for producers at both Covent Garden and Drury Lane. In 1787 the great female tragedian Sarah Siddons gave her Innogen in London with her brother, John Philip Kemble, as Posthumus, a role in which Kemble was to appear twenty-six times between 1785 and 1817. It was said of Kemble’s first Innogen, Mrs. Jordan, that “she could act only the
disguise
of the character,”
²⁹
whereas Siddons rose to meet the “variety of manner and expression”
³⁰
required. However, aspects of Siddons’ performance met with critical displeasure; the power and
grandeur of her style—cultivated in performances of tragedy—were seen to overbear upon “the softness, delicacy, affectionate tenderness, and interesting distress”
³¹
of Innogen. And it was Kemble, as well as the grandiosity of his set designs, that really held the critics’ attention: “Mr Kemble was, by a thousand degrees, the best Posthumus of my time. It was a learned, judicious, and in the fine burst upon Iachimo at the close, a most powerful effort.”
³²

The early nineteenth century saw numerous performances of
Cymbeline
, and laid the foundations for an era of unprecedented appreciation on both stage and page for the story’s heroine, Innogen. Arguably it was Helen Faucit who helped establish this image for the theatergoing public with her famous portrayals of the role in 1838 and 1843, in two productions staged by one of the great actors of the day, William Charles Macready. Macready had in fact acted in several productions of the play between 1811 and 1837, usually playing Posthumus, although he did take on the role of Iachimo three times, once in the 1843 revival in a text again heavily excised (the prison scene went, as did many of Cloten’s “indecorous” moments). Commentators at the time noted the surprising levity and recklessness he brought to the part, while James R. Anderson’s largely ineffective Posthumus nonetheless made an interesting foil in the wager scene through his stiff conservatism: “he marked out the growing indignation at the levity of Iachimo, carefully managing the curling lip and darkened brow.”
³³
The contrast between the two men and the daring of Macready’s performance brought about a vivid reappraisal of the dynamics of the scene for a reporter of the
Spectator
, who noted “a veil of voluptuous wantonness over the repulsive incident of a man, wagering on the virtue of his wife” and saw Anderson’s Posthumus as “merely a rash boaster, and Iachimo a licentious profligate inflamed with wine, both acting on a hasty impulse.”
³⁴

Faucit’s Innogen, however, captured the public imagination above all other facets of the production, her inherent grace and dignity and physically delicate form lending her a great sympathy in the part with audiences. She even played the role again in 1864 at the age of forty-seven at Drury Lane, and, probably in the same year, at Edinburgh, in a cast that featured an up-and-coming Henry Irving
in the role of Pisanio. In a review of the Drury Lane production, one critic recorded how
Cymbeline
was still largely unfamiliar stage fodder, but that Faucit demonstrated the unique depth and beauty of Innogen as an overlooked gem in the pantheon of Shakespeare’s great characters:

The play’s nebulous status again led to its decline from the repertoire after the 1860s, the only other major Victorian production being a then-established Henry Irving’s at the Lyceum in 1896, starring Ellen Terry as Innogen. It was a portrayal that was to be as significant as Faucit’s in cementing the character as one of the greats. A surviving private correspondence between Terry and Shakespeare’s most notorious antagonist, George Bernard Shaw, allows unique insights into her preparation for, and his opinions on, the role and the play:

Shaw’s influence on Terry’s interpretation seems to have been active and strong, though it is difficult to gauge the tone. Shaw is fastidiously precise about the way moments “ought” to be played in the sheaves of advice he sent to her, while Terry’s responses are often brief and apparently deferential. We cannot know, however, how
much she actually took on board and how much is intended to placate an eccentric, overbearing, and probably somewhat intimidating friend:

Shaw wrote a now infamous review of the production which he used as a springboard to attack Shakespeare’s artistry in general, the character of Innogen, and Henry Irving’s inability to play anything other than himself (even though, oddly, he praised his Iachimo in this production). Shaw, ever the contrarian, was impressed with Terry’s rejection of the sentimental Innogen whose “virtuous indignation is chronic” in favor of a more naturalized “innocent rapture and frank gladness.”
³⁸
He also blasted Irving for “disembowel[ing]”
³⁹
the text, though arguably showed far greater presumptuousness in his rewrite of the play’s final act in 1937, which was performed in place of Shakespeare’s in a staging that year at London’s Embassy Theatre. In 1945 Shaw revisited Irving’s production—which, he claimed, did much to ruin his view of
Cymbeline
as a piece of drama—to justify dispensing with the original ending:

The play was certainly among the least performed in the canon during the twentieth century, although there were several other notable productions in the fifty years following Irving’s, usually emphasizing the play’s folktale, mythical dimensions, its niche popularity lying in its perceived escapism from any weighty human realities. Frank Benson staged three productions at the Shakespeare Memorial Theatre in Stratford in 1909, 1920, and 1922, and Sybil Thorndike played Innogen in Ben Greet’s 1918 production at the Old Vic. Iden Payne’s production in Stratford featuring Joyce Bland, Godfrey Kenton, and Donald Wolfit as Innogen, Posthumus, and Iachimo, respectively, ran concurrently with the Shavian version at the Embassy in 1937, and Michael Benthall produced the play at the Old Vic in 1956—with greater critical success than his Stratford production seven years earlier—in a very stripped-down setting, with a young Barbara Jefford as Innogen. Benthall continued the long stage tradition of cutting the vision scene in the prison, and excising many of the lines in the denouement reiterative of plot and smacking too heavily of absurd coincidence. Jefford was universally praised for her Innogen, and Mary Clarke noted how well her youthful vigor served the part.
⁴¹

1.
Ellen Terry, 1896, Lyceum. Her performance as Innogen was a portrayal that was to be as significant as Faucit’s in cementing the character as one of the greats.

Peggy Ashcroft first undertook the role in a 1932 production, again at the Old Vic, and reprised it to great acclaim in 1957 in Peter Hall’s Stratford production. Strangely—and in contrast to critical responses to Jefford’s youth—Faucit, Terry, and now Ashcroft had all enjoyed tremendous success in a part scarcely associated with mature actresses. Hall emphasized fairy-tale elements, uniting critics in praise of what they saw as a directorial strategy to knock the play into some kind of definite shape and measure up to the interest generated by Innogen, a sentiment that continued to dog criticism, as W. A. Darlington illustrated:

The early 1970s saw two major North American stagings of the play, at the Shakespeare Festival at Stratford, Ontario, in 1970, and at the New York Shakespeare Festival the following year. Barry Kyle and John Barton’s 1974 RSC Stratford production (discussed in more detail below) revisited the fairy-tale vision of the play, while a more modern, self-conscious theatricality dominated Braham Murray’s 1984 outing of the play for the Royal Exchange, Manchester, starring Janet McTeer as Innogen and Hugh Quarshie in a rare but thoughtful doubling of parts:

2.
Peter Hall’s production, Stratford, 1957. Kenneth Tynan praised Hall’s “throwing over the whole production a sinister veil of faery, so that it resembles a Grimm fable transmuted by the Cocteau of
La Belle et la Bête.
” Photo shows the Queen (Joan Miller) giving poison to Pisanio (Mark Dignam), Act 1 Scene 5.

Peter Hall bade farewell to his directorship of the National in 1988 with productions of three of Shakespeare’s late plays,
Cymbeline, The Winter’s Tale
, and
The Tempest
, with the former coming in for the loftiest praise of the three. His relationship with the play had clearly changed in the thirty years since he had last staged it:

Hall and his designer, Alison Chitty, felt the plays owed much of their atmosphere to the indoor Blackfriars theater for which he believed they were written, and adopted a broad Renaissance aesthetic, not “aimed at a historical reconstruction,”
⁴⁶
but rather “a boldly emblematic, self-contained universe”
⁴⁷
in which the imaginative dimensions of the three plays could be explored for possible consistencies and interrelationships. Geraldine James played Innogen, and the production tried hard to force audiences to rethink the entrenched image of the character as a saintly vision of feminine perfection in an otherwise slight or unworthy play: