The Winter's Tale review

With its abrupt plot developments and unlikely stage directions, this Shakespeare romance is rightly regarded as a challenging play to bring to life. This glib and gimmicky version, helmed by Shakespeare’s Globe associate artistic director Sean Holmes, struggles to settle on a tone and often sacrifices emotional depth for easy laughs.

The ambitious production marks the first time that both spaces at the Globe have been used for a single performance. The opening scenes, set in the court of paranoid Sicilian King Leontes, take place in the intimate candlelit Sam Wanamaker Playhouse. After a brief interval and a narrative leap of 16 years, the audience moves outdoors to the Globe itself for the rustic celebrations in Bohemia, where we encounter Leontes’ disinherited daughter Perdita on the verge of marriage.

Grace Smart’s evocative if incoherent design gives each location its own distinct aesthetic. In Bohemia, we’re at a country fair with folk-horror undertones, where shepherds in wellies and animal-skull masks dance on a dais of stacked shipping pallets, while strings of garish multicoloured fairy lights glow gently overhead. 

By contrast, Sicilia is coldly chic, all gleaming glass, gilded candelabras and mint-green walls, a claustrophobic mansion populated by silent, stiffly formal servants. From the shadows of a balcony above, composer Laura Moody, along with musician Richard Jones, accompany the piece with a sparse live score of tense, often jaggedly discordant strings, adding to the unsettling atmosphere.