Word: antigonus
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
There were so many points at which this production dealt adequately with difficult problems that I cannot hope to deal with them all. One example: Antigonus is given by Leontes the unhappy chore of dispatching Hermione's newborn baby girl. He takes to ship with the idea of leaving it somewhere, and is directed by Hermione's ghost to leave it in the deserts of Bohemia. Now Antigonus, after leaving the baby, is supposed to be killed by a bear: his last words...
Nunn set the scene in the half-light and intermittent flashes of the storm, and had a huge (about 12 feet tall) and very realistic bear rise out of the blackness behind Antigonus, pick him bodily up, and carry him off, the final action drowned in a scream of loud and hopeless terror, amplified, so that it reverberated in the ear drums. The whole thing was terrifying and convincing, as it should be. The switch, then, to the Shepherd and his son the Clown, was entirely in keeping with the Shepherd's words...
Henry Daniell (as Leontes, King of Sicilia), Florence Reed (as Pauline, wife to Antigonus), Jessie Royce Landis (who plays Hermione, wife to King Leontes), and others are experienced players and do a good job. But it is not enough to take "The Winter's Tale" out of a rather academic classification...