Cymbeline - Shakespeare's Melodrama/Soap

I suppose it is because I reckon myself something of a literary person that I insisted, when I saw it listed as one of the forthcoming plays at the Arts Theatre, on booking for Cymbeline. Degree in English and all that - can hardly miss out on a chance to see a Shakespeare play I have never read, let alone seen. Sense of duty and all that - must tick it off the list.

Reading up on the play beforehand did not lead me to believe we were in for anything but a dutiful evening. Samuel Johnson was very rude about it, and Bernard Shaw thought the last act was so awful that he wrote his own version of it. And the plot is so bad that it could be an opera.

As it was we had a thoroughly enjoyable evening. Cambridge University's Marlowe Society, a hundred years old this year, always produces a slick and well-acted play. This year they had Trevor Nunn, former director of the RSC and the National Theatre, as director. As a student he was in the 1960 Marlowe Society production of Cymbeline. And the talent was prodigious. Not a weak actor in any role.

Alright, the plot is ridiculous, but the language is lovely and you are carried along by good actors into the spirit of it. Cymbeline, the British king, is supposed to be a contemporary of Augustus Caesar, but those scenes which take place in Rome do so in a thorougly Renaissance atmosphere, so there is some dislocation there. I saw lots of inverted parallels with Hamlet in the plot and characters. The king, a widower, is married to a wicked queen who is plotting to have her son Cloten marry the king's daughter by his first marriage, Imogen, and so gain the throne for him. Unfortunately for him she has already married Posthumus an impoverished nobleman who has been exiled and gone to Rome for his presumption.

There is also a wicked Iago-like character (Iachimo) who pretends to have seduced Imogen and so puts her husband against her, a Roman invasion, and two lost brothers of Imogen who were stolen as toddlers by a disaffected nobleman. They, with their kidnapper and Posthumus (illegally come home to Britain) are the means by which the Romans are routed, and all live happily ever after eventually. I say eventually because it takes the whole of the last act that Shaw so disliked to sort everything out.

Of the actors, Lizzie Crarer as Imogen was both talented and beautiful. Patrick Warner, playing Cymbeline in a long wig was the spitting image of Peter Sellers, so one kept expecting Goon-type voices (which he was wise enough not to deploy). Rory Mullarkey played a thoroughly yobbish Cloten whose head one wanted to get on the stage and smack. Not that he didn't get is just deserts. By the end of the second act his head has been struck off and appears on stage bloodily carried around in a sort of string bag. A pity the printed programme was so rubbish. It didn't even have a list of the scenes, let alone an attempt at summarising the plot.

I would see this play again. No longer is Cymbeline on my list of Shakespeare plays to be seen once and then never again. I can't understand why someone like Verdi didn't base an opera on it. I see some lesser composers have done so, but I'm afraid they don't count.

Anyway, long live the Marlowe Society of Cambridge University!