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with a passage cut through the centre, and the changing seasons were conveyed by shifts in the colour of the sets and lighting (stark white for winter, green and fertile for spring). 32
    The style proved an imaginative transposition of the world of the play to the medium of the small screen. At the time of writing, there is yet to be a modern big screen adaptation, though one directed by Waris Hussein, with Dougray Scott as Leontes, is due for release in 2009.
AT THE RSC
The Winter’s Tale
—a “Problem Play”?
    Writing in 1958, two years before the launch of the RSC, Nevill Coghill still felt it necessary to defend six continuing areas of concern regarding the play, among them the suddenness of Leontes’ jealousy, the bear, Time, and the statue scene. 33 To these could be added the “broken-backed” nature of the play, split between two very different worlds and eras, which features so regularly in criticism and reviews. To today’s reviewers and audiences, these concerns are no longer seen as dramaturgical failings. Nevertheless, how eachdirector decides to address these challenges, together with their choice of period and place, and the balance between public and personal, continues to a great extent to define each production.
    Popular as the play now is in its own right,
The Winter’s Tale
is often performed as part of a themed season. In 1960 it gained status as the last in the chronological sequence of six Shakespearean comedies that launched the RSC. Later productions, however, continue to occur in the context of Shakespeare’s late plays (1969, 2002, 2006); the 1984 community tour coupled it more interestingly with Arthur Miller’s
The Crucible
, with which it has strong thematic and dramaturgical parallels.
Venues
    The twentieth-century productions of
The Winter’s Tale
at Stratford were all on the main stage: the scale and intensity of the emotions, the extrovert energy of the sheep-shearing festival, and the very size of the cast enabled the play to fill the large Royal Shakespeare Theatre (RST) space comfortably, while the non-naturalism of the various “problematic” sequences makes a clear separation between audience and action attractive. However, in 1984 the RSC toured a small-scale production to non-theater venues; this very successfully explored the possibilities inherent in a staging that was intimate, as well as involving a promenading audience surrounding and taking part in the action. These principles were reapplied in both the twenty-first-century productions: Matthew Warchus’ Roundhouse production made significant use of onstage promenaders to contribute to the visual picture, even though these had to be cut when the production transferred to the RST; Dominic Cooke’s production for the intimate neo-Elizabethan Swan Theatre in 2006 went further, converting the whole of the stalls to a playing and promenading space, and although designer and director were unable to resist incorporating a mini proscenium arch acting space into the design, the key scenes were made public and played among the audience.
Period and Place
    Although the appeal to the oracle at Delphos suggests the classical world, no RSC director has opted for this setting, standard throughoutthe late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, perhaps because the era contains less resonance for our generation and the costumes can be alienating.
    More surprisingly, the possible Renaissance setting has not proved popular either. Peter Wood’s predominantly medieval 1960 production came closest: “both costumes and dcor evoked a mythical Renaissance, a world in which anything could happen and anything did.” 34 In 1976, the RST was converted into a hexagonal, galleried “Elizabethan-style” thrust stage for the season; even so, John Barton ignored this context, choosing to set his
Winter’s Tale
in Lapland, establishing a primitive, ritualistic setting.
    Both