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production takes us back to Leontes’s tragic court. There is a stillness in these final scenes which forms a fine contrast with the earlier manic activity, a real sense of wonder as the dead come to life and the divided family are miraculously reunited. The moment when Leontes embraces the “statue” of his wife Hermione and cries “She’s warm” achieves an astonishing depth of emotion.
    The cast double and treble their roles (even McBurney plays the clown as well as Leontes), and all make memorable contributions. There must be a special praise, however, for Kathryn Hunter, who is not so much an actress as a human chameleon. In the course of the show she plays a young child (Mamillius), a passionate middle-aged woman (Paulina) and a comic old man (the shepherd) with a verisimilitude that beggars belief. 28
    The Winter’s Tale
has not proved itself a play with wide international appeal, but there have been a number of ambitious modern productions in the United States and elsewhere. Ingmar Bergman took his Royal Dramatic Theatre of Sweden’s production to the Brooklyn Academy of Music in 1995. It was set in the early nineteenth century in a Swedish manor house and played as a play-within-a-play put on by the guests at a young woman’s birthday party. It contained:
    not one but two bears, one brown, the other white … The brown bear is a comic interpolation. The white bear is the beast that figures in Shakespeare’s best-known stage direction: “Exit pursued by a bear.” This bear, being polar, also more or less locates Mr. Bergman’s vision of Shakespeare’s settings of Sicily and Bohemia. They’re now far closer to the chill of the Arctic Circle than to the reviving warmth of the Mediterranean sun. This may be why the play’s dark first half … now has such emotional impact that the light-hearted conclusion seems more of a dream than Shakespeare possibly intended. 29
    Brian Kulick directed a version for New York’s Public Theater in 2000 to mixed reviews. Most critics concluded that the production was “most successful at the breezy comic business that fills much of the latter half of the play.” 30 Barry Edelstein’s Off-Broadway production attempted to update the play but, as one critic pointed out, “The kind of topsy-turvy worlds these plays evoke is not easy to reconcile with business suits and modern technology,” but concluding: “The damage here comes not from Edelstein’s often handsome stage images, which are underscored with elegance by Michael Torke’s superb jazz-tinged piano score and the subtle lighting of Jane Cox, but from the drab delivery of some of Shakespeare’s most challenging verse, which drains too much of the color from this exceedingly colorful play.” 31
    Barbara Gaines’ production for her Chicago Shakespeare Theater is discussed in “The Director’s Cut,” below.
    There have been a number of films of
The Winter’s Tale
, including a 1910 silent version. Several stage productions have been filmed,including Frank Dunlop’s with Laurence Harvey as Leontes in 1968 and Gregory Doran’s 1997–98 RSC production with Antony Sher, Alexandra Gilbreath, and Estelle Kohler. Jane Howell directed the play for BBC television in 1981 with Jeremy Kemp as Leontes. This was one of the more successful productions in the BBC series, as film historian Michael Brooke suggests:
    One of the most daringly stylised productions of the entire project, its stripped-down approach to design and staging working particularly well on television … Production designer Don Homfray (who had already moved towards a minimalist approach with Rodney Bennett’s production of
Hamlet
the previous year) reduced the sets to a couple of cones, a tree (which Howell said was a deliberate homage to Samuel Beckett’s similarly spartan
Waiting for Godot
) and a plain wedge-shaped background