1:22pm Friday 13th October 2006
By Charles Hutchinson
THIS year the Royal Shakespeare Company has commissioned companies from around the globe to interpret the Complete Works of Shakespeare.
Cymbeline is Top 40 rather than Top Ten Shakespeare material, but Kneehigh Theatre consider it to be "an accolade and an honour" that the RSC asked them to do the one with the decapitated body. If one company can make a silk purse out of pig's ear, your money would be on Kneehigh; indeed the RSC might learn a trick or two.
The joyfully anarchic Cornish company does not treat a Shakespeare text like walking on eggshells. Instead, director and adapter Emma Rice and her partner in rhyme, Carl Grose, have the glorious cheek to re-write this late work, improving it by both sending it up affectionately and yet making you care about Imogen and Posthumus like never before.
The storyline is essentially the same, only more concise and streetwise and guided by your host for the night, Mike Shepherd's West Country pantomime dame in Margaret Thatcher blue, Joan Puttock, who helpfully breaks down the fats in Shakespeare's text.
At the same time, Rice and Grose convert it from distanced fairytale to a heart-pumping romp full of danger, sensuous music, saucy humour and Dadaist visual wit, set in a metallic cage that represents the strictures of England under King Cymbeline (Shepherd again). Not that he is fit for purpose, drugged up and sexed up by his ghastly second wife, the string-pulling Queen (Amanda Lawrence).
She insists his daughter Imogen (Hayley Carmichael, captivating throughout) should marry her grotesque son Cloten (Craig Johnson's riff on Ricky Gervais's David Brent), when her heart belongs to banished secret husband Postumus (Grose).
Symbolically the light brightens and the cage doors burst open at the arrival of Robert Luckay's sleazeball Iachimo with his this-is-your-Luckay-day Latino swagger. Kneehigh's touch is equally assured, whether mocking stuffy Shakespeare shows with a motorised toy car or taking the mick out of Milford Haven or moving so adeptly from broad farce to touching tragedy amid gore and war. There is no more exhilarating theatre company at work and play in Britain.
Cymbeline, Kneehigh Theatre, West Yorkshire Playhouse, Leeds, tonight at 7.30pm, tomorrow at 2pm and 7.30pm. Box office: 0113 213 7700
© Copyright 2001-2012 Newsquest Media Group
http://www.yorkpress.co.uk/trade_directory/