In Greg Doran's gripping production, Antony Sher's paranoid King Leontes not only behaves like a suitable case for psychotherapy three times a week, he also exudes the dangerous excitement of a very loose cannon. No wonder Doran took the astute decision to stage the play in what resembles a dream-palace, located on the road to the heart of darkness. Doran's production may succumb to odd streaks of expensive camp and vulgarity, of which the oracle's message delivered by Ruritarian soldiers and a glittering Patriarch in a false beard is the worst. But it still stylishly communicates a sense of nightmare turbulence ruining a royal marriage and court decorum, with Jones's set eerily changing shape and form. Alexandra Gilbreath's Hermione comes to look so racked by grief that it's no wonder Estelle Kohler, who plays Paulina as a brisk Edwardian governess, pummels the king to the ground with her outraged fists.
Bohemia seems boisterously overextended.
Yet Ian Hughes's delightful Autolycus distracts with his thieving tricks, while Emily Bruni's seductive Miranda falls for Ryan McCluskey's promising Prince. When Hermione returns from the dead, and nature triumphs over art, Sher seems oddly chilled. But the dramatic impact of the reconciliation is joyous. In the event, however, Sher proves the largest of the production's three disappointments. Doran and his designer, Robert Jones, set the play somewhere before and after the first world war.