“Cymbeline” at Sam Wanamaker Playhouse

Neil Dowden on the South Bank
28 January 2025

Cymbeline may have the most complicated and bizarre plot in the Shakespeare canon – though it has to be said there is quite a bit of competition. And not only does the story lurch from one curveball to another, the tone of the play shifts frequently and disconcertingly. It was classified as a tragedy when originally printed in the First Folio, but is usually grouped with Shakespeare’s other late plays Pericles, The Winter’s Tale, and The Tempest, as (to sound a bit like Polonius) a historical tragicomic romance. Ten years on, this is the second time that Cymbeline has been staged in the Sam Wanamaker Playhouse, the kind of indoor Jacobean-style theatre for which it was probably written – and the magical candlelight effects suit the drama’s fantastical artifice.

Gabrielle Brooks as Innogen.
Photo credit: Marc Brenner.

Though one of Shakespeare’s lesser-known works, Cymbeline contains many of echoes of his other plays. Like King Lear and Macbeth, its sources include Holinshed’s Chronicles, though unlike Lear this ancient Britain is under the Roman Empire. The barbed relationship between autocratic ruler Cymbeline and rebellious child Innogen is reminiscent of Lear and Cordelia, though not so extreme. The theme of irrational sexual jealousy and violent revenge within a marriage is similar to The Winter’s Tale, or even more Othello with the devious Iachimo an Iago-lite in tricking Posthumus into doubting their partner’s fidelity. Innogen’s disguising herself as young man Fidele leans more towards Shakespeare’s mature comedies Twelfth Night and As You Like It. But the ending with its reunion, redemption, and reconciliation puts it firmly in the group of late romances.

Cymbeline’s hotchpotch of styles means that it needs a director to grasp it by the scruff of the neck and shake it into a coherent whole. Matthew Dunster’s 2016 adaptation in the outdoor Globe Theatre – which he called Imogen (after the main character, though it is now believed that name is a typo of Innogen) – certainly took a strong line with its contemporary urban gangster setting, but it was a misfire. Jennifer Tang’s lively production at the Sam Wanamaker Playhouse also shakes up Cymbeline while being more engaging, yet isn’t able to make convincing sense of all its disparate elements.

In Tang’s reimagined, gender-flipped version, first-century Britain is ruled by a matriarchal court with Queen Cymbeline a sort of Boudicca figure rebelling against the Roman conquest by refusing to pay a tribute. Her equally feisty daughter Innogen has secretly wed the female warrior Posthumus whom Cymbeline banishes – apparently not because it’s a same-sex marriage but because the Queen wants her to marry her own husband the Duke’s son Cloten, who together are scheming to take power by murdering Cymbeline and Innogen. There are other gender-swaps – loyal servant Pisanio is Pisania, exiled courtier Belarius is Belaria, while one of the Queen’s two children they have kidnapped is a princess rather than a prince. The trouble is that although Innogen now has an evil stepfather rather than stepmother, the play’s key theme of toxic masculinity is weakened in this female-dominant setting.

Martina Laird and Aaron Anthony.
Photo credit: Marc Brenner.

The start of the play has been cleverly rewritten so that a conversation between two gentlemen of the court about what has recently happened is replaced by a prologue from Gaia, goddess of the earth (though Greek rather than Roman), who gives the backstory direct to the audience. And it is Gaia, suitably enough for a gynocentric society, rather than Jupiter who intervenes near the end as a dea ex machine to resolve the knotty problems of the human protagonists and help to restore order. Only a deity could do that in this chaotic play.

The show is energetic enough – with the cast sometimes clambering over audience members to make their exits through the side doorways – while the verse is spoken with admirable clarity. Basia Bińkowska’s design includes doors inscribed with bone-like shapes, while the costumes clearly if rather oddly distinguish the pale-coloured Britons from the reddish-dressed Romans. Laura Moody’s atmospheric, percussive score – played by a trio of female musicians – adds an appropriate otherworldly quality to proceedings.

Gabrielle Brooks (who was a spirited Adriana in The Comedy of Errors at the Globe last summer, as well as being nominated for an Olivier for playing Bob Marley’s wife Rita in the biographical musical Get Up! Stand Up! in the West End) impresses as a resourceful, determined Innogen not just passively taking what is thrown at her. Nadi Kemp-Sayfi struggles to make her Posthumus believable as someone who would fall for macho bluster and put a contract on her wife. Martina Laird also isn’t really persuasive as an overbearing, martial Cymbeline, while Silas Carson is a smoothly insidious Duke. Jordan Mifsúd’s slow-witted, bragging Cloten and Pierro Niel-Mee’s provocatively laddish Iachimo bring some welcome humour. And Madeline Appiah doubles as the outlaw Belaria unjustly accused of treason and the divinely empowered Gaia.