Tonight I experienced another great night of Shakespeare in DC, with STC’s production of Cymbeline at the Lansburgh Theatre. Initially the story summary (falsely sullied virtue of a virtuous wife, etc) didn’t excite me, and I had a little difficulty getting into the play at the beginning. But it eventually really grabbed me. This is a rarely produced play; based on my t-shirt the last time I saw this was in 2001 at CalShakes. They used an interesting device of having a fairy godmother reading the story to a little girl outlining the play’s scenes. The story played a lot of bits for humor, which I’m not sure was always the original intent. The bad guy Cloten was played broadly and very amusingly, at one point riding around on a Vespa, very disjoint from the rest of the period setting. By the end I was really loving the play. I was again struck at how good the acting of this company is.
The set was fairly minimalistic but the did some interesting staging effects. For example, a major battle scene at the end had soldiers rhythmically crawling towards each other while the king poured red liquid into a curved water trough that had been part of the set. This conveyed the sneaking and skulking and dying of the armies very symbolically in an interesting way without the usual choreographed banging of swords. They even had a rainstorm on stage, which again points to STC’s amazing production values (even with a minimalist set). All-in-all another very enjoyable night. This is a play I’d consider seeing again.