Raising the dead

In his late ‘romances’ Shakespeare reaches out for happy endings in which sinners are forgiven and the unjustly dead restored to life. This, plainly enough, is territory more problematic than his worlds of tragedy and comedy. For Cymbeline, the RSC’s Complete Works cycle ordered up a rewrite from the Cornish Kneehigh troupe and for The Tempest exiled Prospero to the Arctic. Pericles and The Winter’s Tale it handed to Dominic Cooke, who now subjects both plays to trial by promenade performance. Cooke has cleared out the stalls, thereby creating as large a playground for actors and standee spectators as the Swan will allow. Your £15 ticket buys you a  participatory role in the show, though the proportion deducted by Equity is not  disclosed.

Critics were given a choice of promenade (please) or sit upstairs (if you must). In compliant mood, I opted for the former, though didn’t regret chickening out to the galleries after surviving a groundling’s entanglement in The Winter’s Tale. Had I not missed out on the couple of glasses of real bubbly put away by a colleague at the 1950s-style New Year’s Eve party conjured up by Cooke for the play’s opening scene, I might have stayed the course. At the later sheep-shearing festival, the Old Shepherd offered me a sausage roll and a glass of Bohemian fruit juice, but smilingly thwarted my attempt to catch up on the alcohol by refusing to broach a bottle of the  first-rate stout that appeared to be also available.

Arenas may be very well for parties, but scenes demanding a degree of privacy and enclosure, such as the bedroom of the sickly Mamillius or Leontes’ study were played in an elevated letterbox space above the usual stage area. There were open walkways at the same level on either side of the arena, and descending to it from them a wide curving ramp.