The Winter's Tale

by Ryan Wigglesworth, libretto after Shakespeare's play

seen at the Coliseum on 3 March 2017

This opera, commissioned by ENO, was conducted by the composer. It featured Iain Paterson as Leontes, Sophie Bevan as Hermione, Samantha Price as Perdita, Leigh Melrose as Polixenes, Anthony Gregory as Florizel and Susan Bickley as Paulina. The production was directed by Rory Kinnear and designed by Vicki Mortimer.

Shakespeare's plays are famously - or notoriously - susceptible to ranges of interpretation. Using one as the basis for an opera is bound to intensify this tendency, because so much must be abandoned or condensed in order to create a manageable libretto. In the case of The Winter's Tale, a play not hitherto transformed into an opera, the process has stripped away almost all the rustic comedy (the character of Autolycus is completely missing), and also a good deal of circumstantial detail. The result is that the opera is even more melancholy than the play, with the emphasis far more on the brooding figure of Leontes than on the revivifying figure of Perdita.

The first half is taken up with the story of Leontes's unreasonable jealousy and its awful consequences for everyone around him, and finally also for himself. Sicilia is presented as a somewhat arid and militaristic place with grandiose statuary prominently displayed. The set underscores the feeling: great curved walls are moved around to reveal reception a hall, an office, a bedroom, a courtroom. The silent figure of Mamillius wanders through these spaces at first lively, then increasingly subdued until his collapse. 

In the second half, the Bohemian scene is truncated to an extraordinary degree - Perdita and Florizel are an item, and sing winningly of their devotion, but there is no sense of the disguised Polixenes being at first favourable towards the girl until he discovers that his son is head over heels in love with her, no explanation about her foundling status and no hint of anything that might identify her to those who would recognise the tokens left with her (these do not feature at all). The overall effect is that Bohemia is not a particularly pastoral place - there is a rather garish patriotic poster on the wall, and an almost military salute which everyone adopts when strangers appear (particularly strangers in battle fatigues, such as Polixenes). The passion with which Polixenes disowns his son is as violent as that with which Leontes rejected his wife.

The final scenes back in Sicilia also feel somewhat rushed. Since the play climaxes with the statue scene in which Hermione is revealed as alive, the discovery that Perdita is the child of Leontes and Hermione is only related at second hand, and not staged. Here in the opera Leontes recognises Perdita on stage, but there is almost no reason why he should apart from the remark by Paulina that Hermione in some sense resembled the girl when she was young. (As the tokens have vanished form this version there is nothing tangible to confirm the idea - Leontes is just convinced that he has found his daughter.) 

All of this leaves the great theme of reconciliation and recovery somewhat muted, where perhaps one might have expected the medium of opera to have heightened it. The music rises to some of its occasions - the great trial scene, and the shipwreck are well done - but seems to fight shy of some of the opportunities for enriching the dramatic situation.

That said, the performances were uniformly excellent. Iain Paterson was a commanding and overbearing Leontes, only chastened by the dramatic intervention of the oracle, the death of his son and the apparent death of Hermione, and suitably subdued on his reappearance until he recognises Perdita. Sophie Bevan gave an impassioned account of Hermione, while Susan Bickley as Paulina had great moral authority without the somewhat preachy style that can all too easily come over in a production of the play.

"A sad tale's best for winter" Mamillius says in the play, and the sadness is what receives most attention here - not that the outcome is sad in itself, but the sense of renewal that Perdita and Florizel represent (so well revealed in the recent ballet created from the same play) is given little chance to shine as a balance to the general mess made by the older generation.