Harriet Walter
on
Imogen
Royal Shakespeare Company
Opened at The Other Place, Stratford-upon-Avon on 12 November 1987
Directed by Bill Alexander
With Bruce Alexander as Cloten, David Bradley as Cymbeline, Nicholas Farrell as Posthumus, Jim Hooper as Pisanio, Julie Legrand as the Queen, and Donald Sumpter as Iachimo
Cymbeline is one of Shakespeare’s last plays. It was first performed around 1610, most probably in the indoor Blackfriars Theatre. The setting is ancient Britain during the reign of the little-known King Cunobelinus, which overlapped with the lives of Jesus Christ and the Roman Emperor Augustus. What sort of play is it? In the First Folio Cymbeline is listed among the tragedies. This is odd, since the playwright went to enormous length and used great ingenuity to achieve a final act replete with joyous reconciliation. The only two characters to die are the evil Queen and her son the clottish Cloten, neither of whom are lamented. The play is more usually considered to be a tragicomedy or romance, even a fairytale.
Cymbeline has divided opinions sharply. Dr Johnson complained of its ‘unresisting imbecility, the folly of the fiction, the absurdity of the conduct, the confusion of names and manners, and the impossibility of the events in any system of life’. And Bernard Shaw described it as ‘stagey trash of the lowest melodramatic order’.
It is certainly not a play for rationalists, containing as it does a variety of outlandish subplots involving stolen infants, drugged potions, an evil stepmother, a headless corpse, and the arrival of Jupiter in thunder and lightning, sitting upon an eagle. As such, it poses challenges for the director, and for an actor’s commitment to the truth of their situation. None more so than Imogen’s frenzied lament over the decapitated trunk of Cloten, which she mistakenly supposes to be that of her husband Posthumus. In terms of strict naturalism, the scene is well-nigh unactable. Nonetheless, the play often works extremely well, with a powerful emotional impact in performance. It takes wing when the pantomime elements are embraced and the fairytale nature of the story is given free rein. The long final scene, in which the numerous tangled plot strands are unravelled, can be a stunning blend of awe, hilarity and tears.
Cymbeline is almost unique in Shakespeare in that the central character and stand-out leading role is female. She is sometimes called Innogen; however, I have always been used to Imogen and that was her name as played by Harriet Walter, so that’s who she is in this book. It is a great and hugely rewarding part. A Victorian commentator idolised her as ‘the purest and most womanly of Shakespeare’s women’. More recently, actresses have been praised as impetuous, steely, or strong-willed. Harriet’s was called ‘an Imogen of startling emotional immediacy’. Describing the rich complexity of the role, she has written: ‘In one evening an actress can play Desdemona, Juliet, Cordelia, Lady Anne, Rosalind and Cleopatra.’ Harriet’s performance, together with two other parts she played in the same season, won her the 1988 Laurence Olivier Award for Actress of the Year in a Revival.
I have been in the play twice. First as Belarius, the rugged old caveman and royal babe stealer, in a Cambridge Marlowe Society production directed by Dadie Rylands. The great man was a stickler for textual clarity and accuracy, but less bothered about stage pictures. I remember him prowling the aisles of the Arts Theatre as we rehearsed, nose buried in script, often with his back to the actors and oblivious of our whereabouts. More recently I played Cymbe-line in the Open Air Theatre, Regent’s Park. I broke my leg during the run, but luckily the crusty old monarch could be pushed around in a wheelchair. The King is not one of Shakespeare’s richest eponymous roles, but the offer of the part became irresistible by being paired in that repertory season with Badger in The Wind in the Willows.
The interview was recorded in the upstairs bar of the Lyric Hammersmith in September 2011.
Julian Curry: How would you describe Cymbeline? Is it a fairytale, a romance, a comedy, or a mixture of all three?
Harriet Walter: Chronologically it’s tied together with The Winter’s Tale and Pericles, which have what people call fairytale elements. But it somewhat puts me off when I hear that word, because it feels as if we’re getting into the realm of extraterrestrials, and I’m interested in terrestrials. I think that in Shakespeare’s late plays there are pantheistic elements. The gods in The Winter’s Tale and Cymbeline are not the ones we know, they’re more remote. But they pronounce directly the absolute truth. It’s as though Shakespeare wants to know at that stage in his life that good will prevail, the wrong people will get their comeuppance and the right people will get their rewards.
That’s very strong at the end of the play.
Yes. And it’s not quite the real world, in that sense it’s a fairytale. I suppose he’s cynical enough to know that life ain’t quite like that, but in these plays there is a kind of wishful thinking that we had the power to write our own stories and shape our own destinies, and that there is a great playwright in the sky who can sort everything out.
Perhaps Cymbeline requires a greater suspension of disbelief.
Absolutely.
Where and when did you play Imogen?
1987 at Stratford. Earlier that year I’d played Portia [in The Merchant of Venice] at the Royal Exchange. Then I came to do Viola and Imogen with the RSC, so I had a run of three transvestite roles. Part of what guided me through was that I wanted each one to be different, rather than doing my cheeky boy act every time. But if you were true to the play that wasn’t difficult, because they have very different natures. While Portia swots up the law and takes the place of an intelligent young man in a courtroom, Viola’s very confused but obviously sexually interested although androgynous, that’s her appeal. Ironically, Imogen loses her masculinity when she dresses as a boy. If we generalise about it – masculinity being front foot, high status, proactive – she becomes lower status, less proactive, more passive. And she gets remarked on for her girliness and her cooking abilities. So she was a very different kind of boy.
You didn’t perform it in the main Stratford theatre, did you.
No, it was The Other Place, which in the old days was this wonderful old shack in the middle of a car park. That doesn’t sound appealing, but it had a terrific intimacy. There was just a paper-thin wall between the acting area and our dressing rooms, and there were no real wings. We sometimes had to go out and round the building, perhaps in the rain, and come on through a door at the side. The audience queued in the car park, with hot-water bottles to keep warm. It had a fantastic Dunkirky spirit. It’s a small space anyway, very intimate. And Bill Alexander, who directed, decided to emphasise that by enclosing the acting area with a circle of chairs. They were not proper theatre seats but hard-backed church-type pews and chairs, like a convocation of people in a village hall. And we used the outer perimeter as a sort of moving-around area and wing space, where quick-changes could take place. We had instruments, and there was an old gutted piano with just its strings. The whole cast made the music and sound effects.
Don Sumpter, who played Iachimo, told me he remembers the intense silence backstage, because the dressing rooms were so close to the action and the audience that you couldn’t talk above a whisper.
That’s a very good point.
He said that it gave a wonderful concentration. There was no dissipation of energy.
That’s absolutely true. Because normally when you’re not on stage for a while you go back to your dressing room, you do the crossword…
Lark about.
You have a fag, chat to people, have a coffee and a sandwich in the canteen, remind yourself which play it is that night, and go back on. Whereas there we were absolutely involved all the time, which gave a great focus. And the audience loved being that close to the action. They were perfectly welcome to look over the backs of their chairs to see what we were doing behind them, there was no convention of not being supposed to look. But in another way it could be inhibiting because if you were doing larger acting, when the emotions demand that you’re more histrionic, it didn’t feel right to be two inches from the audience’s nose.
As if you’re doing a film close-up.
Yeah. But for the intimate bits it was wonderful. When I read a letter I sat down on the steps next to a member of the audience who could also read it over my shoulder. Things like that were great.
One critic wrote: ‘Cymbeline has a breadth of vision that sometimes cries out for the main stage.’
It did sit awkwardly at times. I’m sure that comment was referring to the whole canvas of the play, which moves between so many different environments and is like an epic tale, cutting from England to Rome to Wales and back again. It’s got that in common with Antony and Cleopatra, which is set on the world stage and moves very swiftly from one place to another, but is actually quite an intimate play about relationships.
So it’s hard to find the ideal space to do it.
It is hard. But I’m very glad we had that freedom. It was the first time I’d done Shakespeare in that kind of situation, and it was brilliant to be able to deliver the lines quickly. Sometimes when you’re on a big stage you have to sound them out… a… bit… like… that, whereas in The Other Place you could say this thrilling stuff really speedily.
The production was directed by Bill Alexander. Who designed it?
It was sort of non-designed. We had a wardrobe supervisor, Allan Watkins, but it was a design decision to not have a design. We just had whatever was necessary for any scene.
What about when Iachimo is in your bedroom? He comments on specific things.
They were all in the mind. We had basic essentials like a bed, chairs and a table. I don’t even know if we had a throne. But I think it was an advantage in that small space, at the time we did it, to use the notion of rough theatre with a very sparse setting. It’s all up to your imagination, like a dramatised piece of storytelling, as if sitting round the fire.
Did you have a very small budget?
I expect so. It probably all went on Measure for Measure which was playing opposite us in the main house. But we also had the advantage that you can change scenes very fast. I think it’s easier for the audience to suspend their disbelief if you’re storytelling in a small theatre – saying this happened and then that happened – rather than if you’re in a great big barn and bring on seventeen stagehands to do a new set-up every three minutes. Then people go ‘Oh come on, I don’t believe in this world you’re creating, don’t try to fool me.’
How did Bill Alexander work?
He was quite an improviser, and he was a talker. I like talking things out, in moderation, and he wasn’t frightened to sit down and wrestle with what’s going on in a scene. I can’t really remember details of how Bill rehearsed, but it was always a very convivial atmosphere. I’d remember if things were worked to death or if there were big conflicts. I just recall rehearsals being full of intelligence and humour, and discussion and throwing ideas around. So I don’t think he was a methodical sort of restricting director.
You had a score. Music is maybe not the right word, but you made sounds. For instance, you blew over the tops of bottles, filled to different levels.
Exactly. That was clever. There was a line showing how full they should be, marked on each bottle.
To make a different note?
Yeah. With a D written on it or a C sharp or whatever, and you’d know which bottle to play. And then there were wind chimes, and the piano strings.
Heavy breathing noises as well?
There might have been some heavy breathing.
How was the text, was it much cut or altered?
The fact that we included that weird scene with the gods in Act 5 makes me feel it was a fairly uncut version. That was the hardest to stage. From that point on, the play becomes very fairytale. But I find in general with Shakespeare you get this meaty, psychological depth and plot complexity at the heart of the play, and then towards the end he starts to thin the paint out. It’s as if he’s saying the audience have paid for a resolution, for a happy ending, and the reality of your part can be sacrificed. Your character, who’s been very forceful and active in the centre of the story, suddenly starts to melt, particularly the women characters. Viola hardly speaks in the final act, when you’re dying to say ‘Look, my brother’s probably alive, in all the confusion I just heard him mentioned!’ But she doesn’t say anything. And Isabella doesn’t say anything in the last act, Hermione doesn’t, nor do the girls in A Midsummer Night’s Dream. They’re abandoned in the interest of getting the ends tied up and the show finished. And so the suspension of disbelief becomes harder and harder as the play wraps up.
Just beforehand, or maybe even during the show, didn’t the actors mingle with the audience, sit amongst them, chat with them?
Yes. I think that became fashionable with Nicholas Nickleby, but actually I remember doing it in my first job. It was something we did in the seventies to break down the barrier. It was a good mechanism in that particular case because it got them used to the idea that we were going to be so close. And it also blew away any assumption that there was an ‘us’ and ‘them’.
Did you get feedback, the audience answering back from time to time, joining in?
No. Once the play started, a sort of magic took over. It felt like being in a cave on a cold night in ancient Britain, huddling round a fire. And with the acting area being circular rather than rectangular, made by the chairs, there was something slightly hippy-ish, or like a CND peace gathering.
You had a hippy-style headband, didn’t you.
Yes absolutely. With the reconciliation at the end I remember us thinking in terms of glasnost, which was happening, and Greenham Common. In the late eighties there was a sort of earthy, back-to-the-soil, ‘let’s try and rediscover our ancient British wisdom’ kind of feeling.
You were described as ‘an Imogen of startling emotional immediacy’. You’ve played a lot of Shakespeare’s women. What kind of a challenge is Imogen?
What strikes me is that she’s got such a broad range of qualities. I think the parts that have been the biggest challenges to me are Cleopatra and Imogen and Helena in All’s Well. All three do a lot of switching from one mode to another, from tragic to comic, from innocent to calculating and from proactive to passive. Sometimes she’s Juliet because she’s torn from her lover, and she fights her father. She changes into a boy like Rosalind, throwing off her social status which is a millstone round her neck, and becoming one of the people in the woods. Then there’s Cleopatra when she mourns over her dead husband’s body (as she thinks), and has a sense of her own importance on the world stage. And the bewilderment of Desdemona and Hermione when their husbands accuse them of being harlots. She has this extraordinary passivity sometimes, and on the other hand really tells it like it is to her father and Cloten. She’s at her most powerful and emotionally immediate then, she’s fiery. There are echoes of just about every character you can think of. I guess I had youth on my side, because Shakespeare can throw all those things into one character when they’re not set and moulded. That was a nice advantage.
Quite a lot of Shakespeare’s characters have an actor in them. Do you think there’s an actor in Imogen?
Definitely. That’s something else she has in common with Cleopatra, who is totally an actress. She doesn’t know what to do when she’s not on stage. And with Imogen I remember thinking that there was a certain self-dramatisation in her awareness of being the daughter of the King. All eyes were on her, her conduct mattered. Her upholding of certain moral principles mattered. It’s a slightly egocentric notion: I am the heroine of this piece. I remember also a series of strippings-away. First she strips away her regal status when she goes off to Milford Haven disguised as a franklin’s wife, and becomes an ordinary lower-middle-class woman on the road. And then she pretends to be a boy, so she drops her gender. Then she becomes a Roman soldier, so she loses her nationality. Then right at the end she picks it all up again and is restored. But it’s as if she sheds these emblems of her status which have been attached to her personality, and finds her real core self having been stripped of all the accretions. The boy that meets her brothers is the essential Imogen. They talk about her being sweet and gentle, and later she calls herself Fidele. So at her core is a loyal, faithful, tender woman. But what has been built up on top of it is ‘I’ve got a right to fight, I am the daughter of the King of Britain.’ And finally she comes back to that, but with all the experience and the humility she has learnt on the way, she has earned her title.
How did you prepare? Are you a reader of critical studies? Did you borrow from other performers?
I’m not good at borrowing from other actors. I don’t believe in that, because in the context of your production it’s no good doing bits of business that somebody else did, they’re just not appropriate. Your essential quality as a performer is going to be different from anybody else’s, so you have to work with the raw materials of you.
So you took it all from the text.
I took it from the text. What’s interesting is how the style changes from being naturalistic to histrionic, to humorous and delicate, to the fairytale element. It dodges about. There are some scenes that you drive, when you’ve got long speeches and you’ve got to get behind them and motor them. And there are others that are the reverse. I loved the scene with Iachimo for instance, because I had a line for every fifteen of his. I could just listen and react.
Tell me about your appearance.
Hair’s always a compromise if you’re in a season of plays. I had my own, short and red, to play Viola, and we matched a reddish wig that was longer for Imogen at the start. I could have just taken it off when I became a boy, but we decided that because it was this version of old Britain, I’d have a long plait at the back, Viking-style. And I had the headband that you mentioned. It was gold for the first few scenes – low-budget for crown – and then it became leather in the later scenes as a boy and a Roman soldier. It also concealed the wig join. For the costumes there was a rail of old RSC stock, and it was a design decision that we would pick our own clothes, with an overview about colour. The Romans were deeper, darker purple and the Britons were more fawn and ochre, and we’d have gradations within that spectrum.
What about period?
There were some Jacobean jackets, with ordinary straight trousers and boots. It became fashionable in the RSC at that time to do Shakespeare in a mix of periods.
Not rooted in any particular style.
No. But it did have a slightly Robin Hood-y element because of the jackets with trousers and boots.
When the play starts your husband, Posthumus, has been banished and is about to depart. The Queen seems nice and friendly to you both, but as soon as she exits you say ‘O, dissembling courtesy!’ [1.1]. What do you imagine is your relationship?
Well, she’s my wicked stepmother.
Stepmother from hell!
It really has a fairytale element with the King and his second wife and the horrible stepson. It’s such a pity that Shakespeare didn’t write many nice parts for women past a certain age. But I think it’s interesting that he chose to start the action just after we’ve got secretly married. I presumed the reason was because Cloten was being proffered as a possibility to me.
I see. To guard against you being available to him?
Yes. Maybe it was partly a pragmatic thing, because Posthumus and I were more brotherly and sisterly, we’d been brought up together. There’s that lovely exchange right at the beginning of the play, when the First Gentlemen says the fact that she’s chosen him proves how wonderful he is, and the fact that he loves her shows how wonderful she is. They are right for one another, they are the moral core of the play, they’re the good guys and they deserve one another, they’re equally matched. That’s pronounced before you see us, and next we’re being wrenched apart. But she’s a canny young woman, she understands politics, and she knows that this stepmother wants to marry her son to her.
However, you’ve just married Posthumus, and your dues are cut short. Why do you not go away with him, why don’t you elope there and then?
That’s a good question. I suppose it’s the destiny thing. She will be the Queen. That sense of her status on the world map, a bit like Princess Margaret not agreeing to marry Captain Townsend. ‘I am the daughter of the King of Britain and I’m staying here, this is my country.’
You go later on.
Yes, I go later on, when I’m really up against it. Perhaps now I think I can fight it out. There’s that very emotional scene between her and her father, where she says: You taught me to love Posthumus. You set him up, you taught us the same values, you created him, and now you’re abandoning him. Maybe she thinks that if she stays in the court she can bring her father round. But also it’s necessary, dramatically, for us to be separated. That’s Shakespeare’s reason why I don’t go with him. It’s a device, because our love for each other has to be tested.
It’s an interesting relationship because, as you say, you’re brought up with Posthumus like brother and sister. Then you get married and it becomes passionate love. And yet he has this line later on: ‘Me of my lawful pleasure she restrain’d, / And pray’d me oft forbearance.’ As if you were either still a virgin, or being frigid.
Yes, I puzzled over this line. I think I decided that if he had said she pray’d me ‘always forbearance’, that would be very odd, but ‘oft forbearance’ means they did sometimes do it. I wondered if it was simply that Shakespeare felt she must be quite restrained in the sack for us to respect her as a heroine. I think he was shy of writing mature married women, he just doesn’t deal with that side of life.
Very few of Shakespeare’s heroines are married.
Exactly. There are so few happily married couples who are sexy with one another. Kate and Hotspur, I can’t think of many others. Portia and Brutus perhaps. Usually they get married at the end of the play, and we can imagine their future living happily ever after, but we don’t see it.
Immediately after Posthumus’s exit you’ve got the agonising encounter with your father. He’s apparently a really nasty old bugger; nonetheless, there seems to be a great intimacy between you. You have this beautifully caring line, ‘Harm not yourself with your vexation’, while in your own despair.
That’s very good. I remember feeling that it was slightly like King Lear with Cordelia, that he had temporarily lost his judgement and been lured away. However, the audience can’t be allowed to see Cymbeline as an absolute tyrant, an unredeemably horrible man. Cherchez la femme: he has succumbed to this ghastly second wife. But you’ve got to believe in the reconciliation at the end. Again and again the play touches on a theme of flimsy evidence and people’s credulity, how little we trust one another, how little we listen and how easily we judge. I very quickly believe that Posthumus has been unfaithful. He is too easily convinced that I’ve been unfaithful. The King believes Belarius is a traitor, and banishes him on very flimsy evidence. People very speedily believe the worst of one another.
Cymbeline says to you ‘O thou vile one’. A horrible thing to say.
And he slapped me in our production. He hit me.
Oh, really?
Then gave me a hug afterwards.
To make up.
That double gesture summed up something very quickly: that this was the rage of people who loved one another, and his anger was commensurate with his love.
Surface anger, so to speak, rather than deep-rooted.
Well, sort of bewildered animal anger. It is a bit the same as the way Lear reacts most strongly to his best beloved daughter. Or Capulet’s fury at Juliet disobeying his orders. It’s the impotence of the tyrant.
Did you still feel love and respect for him?
I think not at that moment. But she’s got a fierce intelligence. She holds a mirror up to him and says: Do you realise what you’re doing? ‘Harm not yourself.’ You taught me to love Posthumus, you’re going back on your best self and your own inner judgements. I know you’ve been turned, and the real man inside is something else. She’s very articulate. It was a great scene to play because she’s absolutely spouting righteous anger. But it’s amazing, I think, for a daughter to have such a complete understanding of her father.
So she can, as it were, see around the wicked stepmother to the real Cymbeline behind?
I think so.
Then there’s quite a short scene with Pisanio, describing Posthumus’s departure [1.3]. You say this beautiful thing: ‘I would think on him at certain hours, / Such thoughts, and such…’ It’s great the way Shakespeare just lets that trail off, isn’t it.
That’s wonderful, yes.
So in your mind you can play with that, and be wherever you want with it. The next thing you say is ‘I could make him swear’ to be faithful. There’s already a seed of doubt about that, is there?
Yes.
Then the beautiful romantic notion of communing by simultaneous prayer.
What I liked as well is that she’s almost competitive with Pisanio, who becomes terribly important to her. She says: If it had been me watching him I’d have waited until he was a dot on the horizon. We absolutely bond in that scene because we both love Posthumus.
She’s a bit soppy at moments, isn’t she? ‘Senseless linen,’ she says about Posthumus’s handkerchief, which he kissed as he waved goodbye, ‘happier therein than I!’
I wonder whether Shakespeare would have judged that the same way as we do. I don’t think you can fight his sentimentality about young women. The great thing is he puts the other stuff in as well, but at certain moments you are just a rather soppy, lovelorn girl. However, the trajectory of that story between Imogen and Pisanio seems important. I remember thinking he was such a hero, who has been given certain orders by his master and risked a lot, as a low-status person, to disobey them. He’s absolutely torn between his master and his mistress – except she’s not his mistress, she’s the wife of his master, who is really the person Pisanio should take orders from. And at the end he never gets rewarded by the King, nobody acknowledges what he’s done.
Act 1, Scene 6. You start off with a catalogue of Imogen’s misfortunes. Then Iachimo arrives with a letter from Posthumus, and you’re immediately full of warmth and gratitude.
I think one of the things that was established in that scene was her volatility. It’s like Cleopatra, in the way she can turn on a sixpence from feeling utterly forlorn to being ecstatically happy. And that volatility was useful to explain certain plot points, like her credulity, or how she could so quickly decide to go off to Milford Haven. There’s something impetuous about her.
I wonder whether your warmth and gratitude towards Iachimo for bringing the letter turned him on, and encouraged him to come on to you.
That’s exactly how we played it. It’s that curious thing whereby somebody becomes sexy because they’re in love. Their light bulbs are all on, so they become attractive to others.
Perhaps you even flung your arms around him and gave him a kiss?
I think maybe I did. I just absolutely exploded with happiness.
Which would have excited him.
Yes.
Soon Iachimo starts behaving very strangely, he comes out with all sorts of weird stuff.
And I’m thinking: What are you trying to tell me?
What do you make of it? Is he mad, is he ill? Is he dangerous?
It’s very interesting picking your way through all that. This was one of the hardest and most exciting scenes to play, because of the constant interplay. Don did things differently every night, he had different rhythms. You had to be flexible as to how quickly you would believe something, how quickly you catch on. What you believe at any given point needed to shift every night because of the pace that Don would take, or how convincing he was being. If you either believe too readily, or if you don’t get it early enough, you’re making a comment about her which will probably have repercussions later, so you can’t be too stupid and naive. And yet you can’t be too quick to believe the wrong things. I love that.
You like not having it set?
I love that interconnection with another actor where moment by moment, each night, it can slightly alter how things go. That makes the scene really electric. As it was a circle, we were like two gladiators in a ring. The audience could get a bead on his face, and my reaction. They were close enough to feel the excitement of: How’s she going to respond?
Don said you used to tell him he was too slow.
There were times when he left gaps with too much thinking time for me, and I’d be in suspension because Imogen’s a fast thinker. I would be saying to myself: By now I might get it, and it’ll be hard to play the next beat.
After that, Iachimo goes off on a totally new tack. He becomes much more fluent, and makes innuendoes about Posthumus having too much fun in Rome.
My responses were just one-liners, things like ‘Will my lord say so?’
Very short.
Again I remember having to look for a balance. At first of course I didn’t believe this of Posthumus. But as the scene went on there was a choice of tone, and I had to be mindful of what Don needed to get from me. If I was too dismissive, going ‘Oh come on, don’t be so silly’ in my tone, he would have to work harder, whereas if I said in a sort of ambiguous way ‘My God, did he really?’ then he thinks he’s got me. That’s the kind of interplay I meant.
Did you ever really believe that Posthumus was being unfaithful to you?
Oh, I think I did at one point. Yes, definitely. We’re both very vulnerable, and being separated has made us more susceptible to our darkest fantasies. But I believe the play shows she’s more level-headed than Posthumus. She has more self-confidence, maybe because she’s a princess and he’s an adopted… you know, not-belonging kind of lost soul. She might have more capacity to trust. The length of time she believes he’s unfaithful is quite short. But before that I played ‘How should I be reveng’d?’ as if to say: What’s the point of me revenging? That was my thought. What revenge could I have on a thing like this? He’s broken my heart, there’s nothing I can do, revenge is pointless.
So Iachimo’s suggestion of having sex with him surprises you.
Well, he misreads it as: Give me some ideas on how I can be revenged. It might have been cheating, but I was softening the slide. I was not going steeply into total belief, it was more a sadness, a sort of inevitability: Oh, I know what these Roman women are like, I’ve heard about Roman women. What Shakespeare does is heighten the suspicion between the sexes by tying it up with a suspicion of foreignness. Posthumus has gone off to Rome, and Iachimo brings news back from this other country.
So just at that stage you really think he is shagging some Roman.
I really do. But it doesn’t last long, because as soon as Iachimo turns it into trying to seduce her she realises what he’s up to: Oh, I see your trick. Phew, thank God. It’s all okay.
He comes on to you and says ‘Let me my service tender on your lips.’ How physical was that?
He came right up and gave me a kiss. I don’t think I hit him or anything, but I certainly repulsed him, pushed him aside. But Donald is an attractive man, so there was an ambiguity in there which was interesting. He’s a tall, dark, handsome Italian, and she’s only slept with her almost-brother. So there is the temptation of the exotic, and you could say that the repulsion of his kiss wasn’t total revulsion. It’s nice to play that kind of half-and-half.
Afterwards he says he was only testing you, and you came through with flying colours. And you have a three-word reply: ‘You make amends.’ How sincere is that, are you relaxing towards him?
It got a nice laugh from the audience. Because it’s such a wonderful understatement.
Not exactly gushing.
It’s not gushing, but I did it with a slight sort of wry smile: God, you really put me through it! Deep down she has a confidence in Posthumus that is stronger, possibly, than his in her. I think Shakespeare is saying that the female of the species is more loyal, more faithful and more commonsensical. She’s very quick to restore Posthumus to her belief. Therefore Iachimo doesn’t have to work hard to get her to believe that it was just a test. I think we easily believe what we want to believe. But on the other hand, we believe the thing that we most fear, so when Iachimo later plants a seed of jealousy in Posthumus’s heart, it plays on his biggest fear, which is that Imogen will be unfaithful.
How did you end the scene? Iachimo says ‘I must abroad tomorrow’, and you say ‘Oh no no’.
Well I love him by association.
You do?
I think it’s totally sincere.
You’re not just being a polite hostess?
No, not at all. He’s put me through an absolute terror, and the swing back to relief is enormous. I think the volatility that I established earlier, switching from deep depression to ecstatic excitement, served me to go from the depths of ‘Oh, God, he’s been unfaithful’ to the immense relief of ‘You were only joking. Thank heavens.’ I fed that in at the beginning, because I’m not one of those actresses who just plunges straight into all the emotions. I hold back, because I’m thinking what is going to serve the next scene, and the one after. I’m rather calculating. Maybe I analyse a bit too much. But I thought just as Pisanio is associated with Posthumus, so is this guy. He can stay as long as he likes and tell me stories about Rome, and about Posthumus and what he’s doing. He’s really welcome.
So he’s completely off the hook?
Absolutely: No, no, bring your trunk into my bedroom. Of course. No problem at all!
Act 2, Scene 2. The stage direction is ‘Enter Imogen in her bed’. Were you pushed on?
I think there was a brief blackout and I slipped beneath the covers.
It’s a sexy scene but also laden with nervosity. You’d been reading about the rape of Philomel before going to sleep.
Yes. I’m nervous for some reason, and I don’t want the light out. There’s a sense of apprehension: What was that? There’s a little noise.
The first thing you say is ‘Who’s there?’
Yes. It’s jumpy.
In reaction to a noise?
Probably the piano wire, or someone blew over a bottle. Actually I believe there were wind chimes in that scene.
So it wasn’t simply calling your servant.
Well, perhaps it was, but I’m ill at ease. Shakespeare is saying this woman is on edge, and it’s also creating atmosphere, classic horror-film stuff. A minimalist production is a great way to do a play, because the more you give the audience, the more they sit back in their chairs and think it’s a movie. But the wind chimes very simply set up a hot night with the windows open, something strange about to happen, and she’s not quite at ease. The thing that’s lovely is to transfer emotions from one scene to another. You asked how much residue of caution there was at the end of the previous scene with Iachimo. And I felt that at the time she just thought: Oh, thank God. Her relief was so great as to override everything else. Then in this scene you can play the nervousness you didn’t play in the earlier scene, any alarm bells that you ignored previously. But it’s in the text. Always go to the text for clues!
Iachimo emerges from the trunk.
And the audience are in the bedroom with you, they’re in this tiny room.
They must have been astonished at that moment if they didn’t know the play.
Absolutely. And most people didn’t.
‘But kiss,’ he says, ‘one kiss… How dearly they do it.’ So he plants a kiss.
Yes. And I return the kiss.
You returned it?
I took ‘How dearly they do it’ to mean that my lips responded.
In your sleep?
In my sleep. It’s what I was saying before, that a person is sexy when they’re in love. They’re more open. There’s a nice ambiguity in that. She might have been dreaming about Posthumus, and the sensation of a man’s kiss calls up Posthumus, so she just responded physically in her sleep.
Next he takes your bracelet off, still without you waking up. And then he sees ‘a mole cinque-spotted’ on your left breast. How did that work?
He opened my night-dress and took a peek, all he had to do was undo a button. The audience couldn’t see anything, but Donald could.
Steamy.
It is. Of course you’re at your most passive and vulnerable, so it’s steamy because of the power the man has got. What a brilliant piece of writing.
Did you move in your sleep?
I stirred a bit at that point when he took the bracelet off. My arm moved in reaction to something happening. I kind of went ‘Ohhh…’ [Harriet shifts her arm lazily backwards over her head.] It’s slightly dangerous – is she going to wake up?
But you don’t. The clock strikes three and Iachimo gets back into his trunk. Act 2, Scene 3 is a short scene in which you’re pestered by Cloten.
That was a wonderful scene to play after having been passive and wordless.
What does Imogen think about Cloten? He’s an imbecile and a pesky nuisance, but is he also dangerous?
He is an imbecile, and I can get the better of him verbally. I completely outwit him, he doesn’t even understand what I’ve said. But the audience does of course, and they appreciate it. Imogen is wonderfully articulate in her rage. I loved that.
The scene escalates from being quite polite on Imogen’s part into a real slanging match.
Yes.
I wonder why. Does he get physical with you?
Bruce Alexander played Cloten on a knife edge of being an imbecile but also quite dangerous. He was just a bit nutty, a bit of a loose cannon. So I think Imogen’s not totally unfrightened of him. But again, you get these bleeds from one scene into another. She has just gone through a deep disturbance that makes Cloten a complete side issue. Her subtext is: Yesterday I had this nightmare moment of being convinced my husband was unfaithful. You’ve no idea what I’ve been through. You’re nowhere on my level. Leave me alone, I’m not in the mood, once and for all just piss off. In a way it parallels the actress’s journey, because you’ve been pretty un-verbal and then lain passively in bed, and now you get the chance to make mincemeat of this guy who can’t begin to keep up with you. As an actor, you get a kick out of being able to flex your muscles again. And it’s witty, her turns and comebacks are very clever. But ultimately she can dismiss him because she’s married: You are no threat to me and I can’t marry you because, actually, I’m married already.
So it’s not that he tries to grab you?
I don’t think so.
Finally at the end of the scene you realise your bracelet’s missing. Moving on to Act 3, Scene 2. Pisanio shows you Posthumus’s letter. You take ages to open it, even blessing the bees that made the wax that sealed it.
That could be infused with a slight dread, or it could be just a delicious delaying of the moment. Shakespeare’s so good at characters who are in love with love, and say wonderful things and invent mad metaphors about it. There’s a delight in that. But it’s also a device to set her expectations up. The audience sees her anticipating something wonderful, when they know she’s due to get the opposite. It’s a dramaturgical thing.
Not to be taken altogether naturalistically.
No.
By contrast the letter seems quite short and formal, but that doesn’t bother you in the least and you get straight into ‘O, for a horse with wings!’
I did a lot of work with [RSC voice director] Cis Berry on that because I found it one of my hardest speeches. It’s so difficult to be in a state of mind which demands that you speak those lines, while saying: Just let me be there now! How do you grab at an image like a horse with wings, in a split second? How does the brain formulate images to express emotion in such a short space of time? I learnt from Cis how fast the mind works and how quickly language responds. It’s artificial because Shakespeare sat down and wrought it carefully, whereas you have to spark the thought immediately and invent the language there and then. But that was easier, as I said, because with the proximity of the audience you could be very instant and naturalistic. In a bigger space you’d have to be more measured and sing it a bit, whereas there you could switch on a sixpence.
No hesitation in rushing away to him this time.
No. Exactly. I think it’s all fed and bled into by the earlier scene with Iachimo. My own loyalty had been tested, and I’d been through the brief psychodrama of believing that Posthumus was playing around. Now he’s been totally reinstated as a faithful husband. Thank God it was just a test, but how ridiculous that he needed to test me. Anyway I’m convinced everything’s fine now, this is so exciting. After Cloten’s just driven me nuts, it’s dramatically perfect. He did the best thing he could possibly do: he gave me an excuse to leave home and get out. It’s just wonderful. But the other aspect of it is that we’ve all got a slight underlying guilt, and you never know, maybe she did feel slightly attracted to Iachimo. So she’s also thinking: Oh, I’m so pleased I’ve got the chance to show Posthumus that I’ll do anything for him.
Pisanio, for his own reasons, doesn’t want to go. But she says ‘I see before me, man: nor here, nor here, / Nor what ensues.’
That is perfect, it’s so much her. Talk about emotional immediacy. That is what she is, incredibly impulsive.
Act 3, Scene 4. It’s taking ages to reach Milford Haven. Pisanio has a letter from Posthumus, and is behaving very strangely. You ask him questions: ‘What is in thy mind, / That makes thee stare thus?’ But he doesn’t answer. What is Imogen thinking?
I don’t think she fears any bad outcome. We were sort of puffing and panting, and she notices something’s wrong, because nothing gets past her. There are plenty of clues that she’s someone who picks up every eyebrow twitch, she’s very perceptive. But her excitement and determination to meet Posthumus is the overriding emotion so I don’t think her mind is anywhere near dread or worry at that point. So it was just quite a light ‘What’s wrong?’
But I wonder why Pisanio’s looking so troubled. Do you think he might actually be about to do the deed and kill you, on Posthumus’s orders?
Very possibly. But he feels sure she’s innocent, and is dreading what he’s going to have to do. So after I read the letter, what then?
The letter says ‘Thy mistress, Pisanio, hath played the strumpet in my bed.’ And you’re reacting to that, just poleaxed.
Utterly poleaxed. Blaming herself, blaming other women. Posthumus has sent Pisanio to kill her because he’s heard she’s been unfaithful. And her thought is: The Posthumus I know would know I’m not unfaithful. He just knows I’m not. So it must be that some Roman woman has lured him away. Therefore I give up, there’s no point living. – And what does Pisanio say?
He has a speech of eight or ten lines saying she can’t possibly be guilty, judging by the way she’s reacting to the accusation.
Which means that he did think she was before.
Well, it means that he might have thought so. It’s not entirely clear. But in any case your mute reaction makes his mind up. Does that make sense to you?
It makes total sense. And then the absolute blinding fury after that.
You let forth a torrent. ‘False to his bed?’
That was wonderful, having just gone through everything, it’s an amazing scene to play. I think that was probably my favourite.
Why?
Well, just because you’ve got this absolute death wish: What is my life worth if he believes this of me? Go on, kill me – isn’t that what she says?
It is. ‘Prithee, dispatch: / The lamb entreats the butcher.’
She’s absolutely on the very edge.
But isn’t it odd that she begs Pisanio to kill her, having just read this absurd false accusation?
Well, I think it’s to do with the self-centredness of lovers. Again it’s a bit like Cleopatra. Our love is the only thing in the universe, everything outside of it is pale and insignificant. She doesn’t really believe Posthumus thinks she’s unfaithful. She’s convinced he can’t think that. Therefore this must be a pretext to get rid of me, in order to have some other woman.
‘Some jay of Italy…’
Exactly. Rather misogynistically, she says a woman has betrayed him, not he has betrayed me. It’s a funny use of the word ‘betrayed’ because it means she has lured him away, has made him betray himself. But her attitude is: There’s no point in my life now. I was only here for that reason. Now you can get rid of me. Again, it’s impetuosity.
Eventually Pisanio calms her down and she agrees with his scheme to go to Milford Haven disguised as a boy and serve the Roman general Lucius, in order to get news of Posthumus.
He gives her a release, a hope, a way forward.
Unlike a lot of other Shakespeare heroines, disguise as a boy coincides with her thinking she has been rejected by her man. I wonder if she welcomes it as a denial of her femininity.
She’s a forlorn boy, isn’t she. As I said before, there are these strippings-away, first of her status, then of her gender, and then of her nationality. All these layers were her identity, and when you strip them away you find the core which is Fidele, the faithful person.
At the end of the scene Pisanio says ‘Here is a box: I had it from the Queen…’
Yes. Why don’t I say ‘No thanks, I wouldn’t touch anything she gave me’?
Indeed. That looks like one moment when she’s not so sharp.
It does. Maybe at that point when she wouldn’t mind dying, she thinks: What the hell, I’ll be in a foreign camp and this might be quite useful. It’s a bit like having a cyanide pill with you, isn’t it. Well, perhaps that’s a bit extreme! But you’re right, she’s not thinking very clearly. It’s convenient for the plot, a very visible device. And that’s where the fairytale element comes in again, when you suddenly have to suspend your disbelief. It’s in order to make the story work, and the engine of the story will ultimately reveal something about humanity. That was where we put the interval. It’s not a happy first-half ending, but at least she’s not dead, she’s going to live another day. And the next time you see her she’s a boy living in a cave with three wild guys.
Act 3, Scene 6. In the Welsh mountains.
Don’t I say I’m rather hungry or something?
Starving, sleeping on the ground, dressed as a boy. How does a princess adapt to those conditions?
It’s pretty life-changing. But because it mirrors her emotional state of rock-bottomness, I think it’s quite a comforting place to be.
So it’s alright. A bit like Lear out on the heath, in that sense.
Yes.
The entire scene consists of a soliloquy. Who are you talking to?
The audience.
Who are they?
They’re my friends. They are Britain. They’re the principles I was brought up with, and Posthumus was brought up with, they’re on my side. We are often told when acting a soliloquy that the audience is on your side. You take that for granted. And so basically it’s: Gosh, you’re still with me, loyal followers! I’m so glad. Let me tell you what’s happened recently.
You seem to get a new lease of energy on seeing the cave, and in you go. In Act 3, Scene 7, Imogen meets wild cavemen who turn out to be noble savages.
She’s caught in the cave, isn’t she.
Stealing their food.
Like Goldilocks. I wonder if Shakespeare knew all those folk stories with characters like Goldilocks, or the crotchety old King and the wicked stepmother.
How did they look? Were they wild and savage?
They were rather lovely looking and hippy-ish, with long, flowing locks and old rags and things.
‘Good masters, harm me not,’ you say, sounding flustered.
Well, I’ve been squatting in their house, haven’t I. There’s got to be a real fear of the unknown, and in her eyes they are savage people. They’re animal-like, wearing lots of wild furs. And she hasn’t met such people, ordinary folk if you like, she’s been kept rather sheltered. But they turn out to be quite sweet.
Arviragus calls you ‘brother’. But Guiderius never does. He seems to come on to you immediately. He says ‘Were you a woman, youth, / I should woo hard.’
There are lots of those jokes, whenever Shakespeare dresses a girl as a boy.
Is it homoerotic?
That is forever ambiguous with Shakespeare. All we know is that it was the opposite way round when the plays were first performed. Theirs was the eroticism of a boy playing a girl playing a boy, and ours is the eroticism of a girl playing a boy, so it’s different from what Shakespeare intended. Jokes like ‘Were you a woman’ are Shakespeare stepping outside and having fun and lifting the mood. If it was a film the music would get lighter at this point.
Belarius says ‘He wrings at some distress.’ Can you remember why?
Well, there’s plenty to be sad and forlorn about. There’s something of this boy that’s a bit tragic, I think, and lost.
The next scene, Act 4, Scene 2, starts with you saying ‘I am very sick.’ What’s the matter with you?
I’m in mourning. You mentioned the Lear thing, which is very good. She’s lost her way, she’s lost herself.
Sick at heart.
Sick at heart, and she’s just coasting in a trance-like state through this period of her story on her way to the Roman ships. She doesn’t know where she is, but these people are being nice and comforting and she can relax with them.
There’s an amusing little bit of pedantry later, when she says ‘I am not very sick, / Since I can reason of it.’
I love that. It’s a lighter bit of the play, even though her situation is still tragic in her own eyes. I think it’s set up by the earlier soliloquy, saying to the audience: Here we are again in another part of the forest – which brightens the tone. There are often these gradations, especially in slightly odd plays like this and All’s Well, where the action may remain similar, but the tone changes. You may go from prose to blank verse, or rhyming couplets or whatever. It’s like a symphony moving from key to key, you just have to go with it, you can’t remain in a tragic state. Your situation hasn’t altered, but you’re a bit lighter in your touch.
Imogen is wobbly and vulnerable, and Guiderius suddenly says ‘I love thee, I have spoke it.’ That reads like a shy teenager, blurting it out.
They’ve never met a girl, or anything that’s like a girl.
How much testosterone was there in it?
I don’t think it was very testosteronic. But the irony was that she became more feminine, paradoxically, because of the male disguise. Playing Portia and Viola in the same year, I noticed the degree to which they became boyish or manly was quite different in each case. Imogen, of all of them, is more noted for being feminine, especially at this point, because she’s absolutely pathetic and is not even trying to be butch.
You exit back into the cave and take the drug. While you’re asleep, Guiderius kills Cloten and you wake up, rather woozily, next to his headless body. You mistake it for Posthumus, and deliver an extraordinary soliloquy.
The opening was lovely because it was sort of dreamlike. The feeling was: Where am I? Milford Haven? What, do I dream? Am I dreaming? Is this real? That was a very nice way into it. After that it’s the most impossible bit of the whole play. I dreaded it every night, because the very thing that was such an advantage early on, this small intimate space, became a real drawback.
You’re in a frenzy of grief.
I have to be in a sincere frenzy of grief, but because of the proximity of the audience it was very difficult. The dead body was from some other RSC show, again low-budget. It was only vaguely the right size for Nick Farrell, who was playing Posthumus, and the cloak was a very different shape. The corpse was a papier-mâché dummy, so if I plunged myself on to it, it would rock about like an empty boat. The audience sometimes couldn’t help sniggering, which was inhibiting. It was very hard because your character has to be sincerely tragic, although the audience knows it isn’t a tragedy. You have to be convinced your husband’s dead, in the most horrifying way. And of course you know his body, but this is meant to be Cloten’s body, which is absurd. If you’re right under the audience’s nose that’s really very difficult to do. So I tended to hold back. Added to that was the problem of jumping straight out of a woozy sleep to ‘His foot Mercurial: his Martial thigh, / The brawns of Hercules’. It was like ‘O, for a horse with wings…’: How do you get there? I felt unconvincing, because I was being judgemental of myself and thinking I wouldn’t believe me if I was watching this. Which is always inhibiting. But I braved on through.
You toughed it out.
I toughed it out.
You’re convinced that Pisanio is behind Posthumus’s murder. But you’ve been very pro him up till then. Where do you think that comes from?
She seems to go a bit bonkers. I think you can either say it’s Shakespeare being a bit loose, a bit crazy, or you could say it’s part of this theme that runs through the play of how easily we believe things. But also, my theory is that the audience suddenly becomes the gods. They know the plot, and they’re observing us as mortals. They know the corpse isn’t really Posthumus, and they know that Pisanio didn’t do it, and so the play is telling us as human beings, how stupidly wrong we can be about things. ‘Lord, what fools these mortals be!’
So it’s futile to look for a naturalistic reason why you suddenly turn against Pisanio?
Well, I probably tried to find one, knowing me, but I can’t remember what thin thread it was.
Finally you smear the corpse’s blood on your face.
There must have been a little pot of paint in the neck or something.
You collapse weeping over the body and are woken by Lucius. Who do you think he is?
Well, I know he’s a high-up Roman because of his costume, and my scheme was to get nearer to Rome in order to hear about Posthumus. That’s been blown sky high because Posthumus is dead. Or so she thinks. But in the bewilderment of grief she’s hanging on to anybody sympathetic.
Any port in a storm.
She’s at rock, rock, rock, rock bottom at that point, can only go up. But that was a great little scene to play, because I didn’t tell Lucius everything. He asks my name, and I just say ‘Fidele, sir’. It was lovely that she grasped at that name, because it’s an Italian word meaning ‘faithful’. I adore the way she comes up with that. She can see he’s a Roman commander and she’s lost everything, so she’s going where her fortunes take her.
Into the final scene [5.5]: 486 lines long, with endless revelations. The cast learns the story of the play, which the audience already knows. Bernard Shaw was so irritated that he rewrote it. It’s got intimations of resolution and regrowth which can be very moving, but are also in danger of provoking gales of mirth. How did you feel, coming face to face with your father again?
There was a satisfaction in hiding behind the disguise and watching him learn the full story. I wanted to see how he felt about all that had happened. There’s nowhere she can say: You were horrible to me, Dad, and you were an idiot to love that woman, but I’m glad you’ve come to your senses – as she wants to. But again, Shakespeare does sometimes abandon certain plot lines in the final act, in the interests of getting the more important strands tied up. Isn’t there a bit where I talk to him in private?
He says ‘Ask of Cymbeline what boon thou wilt.’ You’ve recognised the diamond that Iachimo is wearing, and the boon you ask is to know how he got it. The story continues to unfold, and Posthumus reveals himself. He says ‘I am Posthumus, / That kill’d thy daughter.’ Now he’s at an extremity of grief. How on earth do you stay silent?
Those are basically acting problems, aren’t they. There are times when you have to wonder: Why don’t I say anything? Michael Caine tells a story about when he was playing a small part and the director said ‘Come on, you’re drifting off, you look bored.’ Caine replied ‘Well, I haven’t got anything to say.’ And the director said ‘You have, you’ve got lots to say, but you’re not allowed to say it.’ So as an actor you have to find a reason why you don’t intervene. I think in that instance it could be a slight pleasure in allowing Posthumus to go through feeling distraught that he killed me in order to say: Actually, you didn’t. You know you’ve got this thing up your sleeve. Everybody has to find their moment. It’s a dramaturgical jigsaw and we have to submit to it. I think that’s what I thought. I want to observe, I want to see how he feels about this. And there was a slight… not punishment exactly, but a feeling of: I want to be sure. Also I was in shock, I hadn’t seen Posthumus for months. He’s been in my dreams, a god and a devil, and this is the real man. So I’m just going to watch him from the safety of my disguise.
Finally you can’t hold back any longer and you say ‘Peace, my lord; hear, hear.’ But he doesn’t recognise you.
That’s right. It became quite physical. I remember being thrown to the ground by Posthumus, so I actually hit the deck and was knocked out for a few seconds.
Pisanio helps you up. And you turn on him and tell him to bugger off.
I did attack Pisanio because I thought he had tried to poison me, but he jumped out of the way.
You tell him to ‘Breathe not where princes are.’ And Cymbeline then says ‘The tune of Imogen!’ It’s only at that moment that he recognises your voice.
That’s right. I wonder whether I changed my voice.
There’s a new haughtiness to that line.
Definitely, she sounds quite arrogant. Not arrogant perhaps, but sure of her status.
Finally there’s a beautiful resolution. You say to Posthumus ‘Think that you are upon a rock, and now / Throw me again.’ And he answers ‘Hang there like fruit, my soul, / ’Til the tree dies.’
That’s wonderful. Shakespeare has shown her to be a rock most of the way through.
After the reunion with Belarius and the boys, Cymbeline says of Imogen, ‘she, like harmless lightning, throws her eye / On him [Posthumus], her brothers, me, her master, hitting / Each object with a joy’. How was that staged?
I think I was near Cymbeline, in the middle of the circle, and I looked around and thanked everybody in my mind. I acted out what he said, just an eyeball thing. It was an easy emotion to play at that stage because things have come right. I love ‘like harmless lightning’. She lights up wherever she looks, throws a spotlight.
How was the ending?
We’d had the earlier scene with the gods coming out of the skies, and the end had the feeling of bringing us to prayer. Everyone sat round in a circle, rather oldhippy style, or like a primitive tribe, including the Romans. After the nationalistic fervour earlier on, this was a meeting of the human race. Everybody was embraced in the circle apart from Cloten and the Queen who were dead. We’d been purged of all the bad animus. There’s a simple satisfaction in the tying-up of the tale, with everybody getting sorted out, as Shakespeare always does. The only strand which is neglected is Pisanio’s. I thought I should have said: I’m sorry I suspected you, and thank you for preserving my life. So I cheated slightly and directed to him that one line, ‘You are my father too, and did relieve me / To see this gracious season’, which is supposed to be for Belarius. Why does the playwright put an audience through watching a whole bunch of people telling one another what the audience already knows? The community is restored and healed, and the King is back to himself, people have come to their senses. They’ve been through a journey that’s taught them about themselves and about one another, and their own thoughts. It was an idealised arrival at a peaceful place. In the late eighties there were various moves happening in the world: Apartheid was coming to an end in South Africa, Russian Communism was breaking down, there was a sense in which communities could reconstitute themselves in a more optimistic way and that leadership could be good and important. We didn’t have cynicism about that. And I felt that the audience – having been intimately involved in some earlier scenes, to the extent of being in the same bedroom and breathing the same air as Iachimo while Imogen was sleeping – are now whisked up to the sky, looking down at these silly little mortals who are involved in a story. They become small people at the other end of a telescope, and we can leave them now that their trifling problems have been sorted out.
Can you sum up Imogen’s journey through the play?
I think her love takes her on a journey that starts with, if you like, rather innocent arrogance and self-centredness. As her story progresses, various trappings, as I’ve said, are stripped away. At every stage she proves her love and develops a deepening sense of her own values and a truer core of her identity. And having gone through that journey, she can say at the end: I am a rock, I never wavered. I and my self-belief have been proved rather than given to me by my status. I am a solid person and worthy to be Queen of Britain.
And Posthumus?
Posthumus is not so well treated by Shakespeare and I don’t think the audience like him as much. It’s not totally satisfactory. He’s done that with other characters, Bertram in All’s Well, for instance. But he then has a redeeming female like Helena who, by her love of the man, elevates him and makes him worthwhile. If she loves him he must be okay.
