The Winter’s Tale

Abstract

The Winter’s Tale was a bleak, Nordic affair. Two years ago Trevor Nunn set the RSC production somewhere near the Arctic Circle. Robin Phillips’ concept was different yet related. Sicily was a court of Eastern Europe, sometime in the 1880s: polished, artificial, repressed. It was a civilization and its discontents. The critics variously guessed the location as Austro-Hungary, a German or Baltic principality, or Czarist Russia. For me, the Russian elements predominated. Young Mamillius, in white uniform and kneeboots, was clearly a Czarevitch. The soldiers wore long greatcoats, and Paulina a fur hood. The brief scene with the Delphic messengers took place in a railway station à la Anna Karenina. Polixenes, visiting from one of the German states, wore a Maltese cross decoration. An Orthodox priest appeared among the extras. All pointed to the unstated historic metaphor at the heart of the production: the Winter Palace. (Ralph Berry, Shakespeare Quarterly 30 [1979]: 168)