Chris Pickles - Director
Nicholas Green - Assistant Director
Adrian Lillie - Designer
Georgina King - Assistant Designer

Charlotte Claypole - Dorcas
Lindsey Danvers - Autolyca
Sonia Fraser - Camilla
Crispin Harris - Antigonus/Old Shepherdess
Robin Kermode - Leontes/Clown
Kaylouise Lindsey - Mopsa
Ilona Lindthwaite - Paulina
Felix Mosse - Mamillius
Michael Rouse - Florizel/Lord
Adam Tabraham - Polixenes/Gaoler/Mariner
Carolyn Tomkinson - Hermione/Perdita

still under construction...

“O, these flawes and starts, (Imposters to true feare) would well become A womans story, at a Winters fire Authoriz’d by her Grandam:” (Macbeth, III.4.)

“A sad Tale’s best for Winter:” announces the doomed son of Hermione as she encourages him to try to “fright” her with a story of sprites and goblins. Indeed, Shakespeare’s choice of title for the play The Winter’s Tale tells us much about what is to follow. Four hundred years ago, before television, radio and cinema existed, before the widespread availability of the written word in book form, if your “Grandam” offered to “weare away the long age of three houres, between your after supper, and bed-time” with ‘a winter’s tale’, you could look forward to sitting down in front of the fire with the rest of the household to be entertained and thrilled by an incredible saga of fantasy, ghosts, magic, romance and amazing events. The more unlikely and startling the better. And with this play Shakespeare is giving us a winter’s tale.

He’s also telling The winter’s tale of the title. If Mamillius’ story of a man who dwelt by a churchyard had been allowed to continue, would it have paralleled the story of King Leontes as told by Shakespeare in the play? After all, does not Leontes, as a result of his rash, almost insane actions, become the man dwelling by a churchyard, who daily has to face the bleak sight of the graves of his wife and son?

On another level has not Leontes created a cold, lonely winter around and within himself? Perhaps, in one way, this is a play about winter. A sixteen year long winter of discontent that can only begin to turn into spring when Leontes’ rejected daughter is returned to him. And we feel the emotional winter of the court of Sicilia even more keenly when it is contrasted with the joyous summer freedom of the rural Bohemia of Act IV.

Perhaps also, in his choice of title, Shakespeare is asking us to look at this play and accept it as something different in the way of storytelling through drama. This play, along with “Pericles”, seems to have a different structural feel to much of his other work. It seems to have a more episodic, almost “soap opera” quality. And, like all the best soaps, we have present the truth of our everyday lives – love, death, violence and reconciliation – but a truth which is heightened and made ‘fantastical’. Throughout the play he constantly reminds us that we can believe in the most remarkable events, and that the most outrageous emotions and thoughts can be true. Life is stranger than the most unbelievable of fictions. As Paulina says in the play:

“That she is living, Were it but told you, should be hooted at
Like an old Tale:”

And as another character exclaims:

“This Newes (which is call’d true) is so like an old Tale,
that the veritie of it is in strong suspition:”

In other words, Shakespeare is asking us to suspend our disbelief and enjoy the fantasy and romance of the story he has to tell in the play, but that we should never forget that’s what it is. A play, an entertainment. Fun. Even Perdita admits:

“I see the play so lyes
That I must beare a part.”

Enjoy its twists and turns, its music, dance and magic, its romance, outrageous comedy and appalling tragedy. And of course, if it’s not giving too much away, its happy ending.

Chris Pickles
London 2003