Let’s hear it for the boys!

Propeller's The Winter's Tale, anything but a drag...
Propeller's The Winter's Tale, anything but a drag...

Edward Hall’s plucky Propeller theatre company have made a name for themselves by staging Shakespeare plays with a historically authentic all-male cast but a pleasingly contemporary sensibility. Last year they visited the Lyceum in Sheffield with a slasher-style Richard III and a Comedy of Errors in the mould of Faliraki Uncovered. This week they’re back with Shakespeare’s curious late play The Winter’s Tale, a sometimes uneasy mash-up of royal tragedy, broad pastoral comedy and the usual dose of entirely incredible coincidences.

We start in the court of Leontes amongst a fug of cigar smoke and the tinkling of light jazz piano. The jovial king is trying to persuade his fellow king and childhood friend to prolong his visit to Sicilia, but while Polixenes is deaf to his chum’s pleas he capitulates to the request of Leontes’ elegant wife Hermione. This chivalrous deference sparks a fire of jealousy in Leontes and in the length of a soliloquy he has convinced himself of their adulterous affair. Soon his jealousy has overtaken his reason as if he is seeing everything through the distorted mirrors which line Michael Pavelka’s chilly set. He resolves to kill his friend, put his pregnant queen on trial, and declare the baby daughter she delivers in prison a bastard, to be abandoned on a foreign shore. However, when the king hears the oracle pronounce him deceived in his jealousy, hard on the heels of news of his wife and son’s untimely death he curses himself for his stupidity and the steel-plated court becomes his prison house.

Leontes’ snap mood swings, given little of the careful textual development of Othello’s jealousy, strain the emotional integrity of the play and yet Robert Hands invests the part with a fiery hotness only equalled by his doleful regret. As his (drag) queen Hermione, Richard Dempsey has the quiet and affecting dignity of the memorial statue (s)he will later become. But the stand-out performance of the Sicilian court is Vince Leigh as the moral matron Paulina. Despite looking like one of Hinge and Bracket, Leigh shows this to be a subtly powerful, complex and eloquent part for an older woman. Given that such parts are rare it seems rather unfair that it is here played by a man.

These Sicilian scenes are played reasonably straight albeit with some nice touches. Among them is the backdrop of a huge moon which waxes and wanes with Leontes lunacy, and the rather creepy device of using the dead Prince Mamilius to demonstrate the action with his toys, suggesting even royalty are playthings of the gods. However, it’s in Bohemia –  where the abandoned Princess Perdita has grown-up amongst shepherds –  that Propeller really start to have fun. The Arcadian festivities enjoyed by these yokels are here transformed into a mini-Glastonbury complete with tents, psychedelia and a rather brilliant reworking of Beyonce’s Single Ladies which rivals even Liza Minnelli’s version in Sex and the City 2 – practically the only reason to watch that particular turkey. The real scene stealer however, is Tony Bell as Autolycus, here a louche aging rocker who plays fast and loose with the text as well as the upper age limit on wearing leather trousers. It’s in these camply hilarious Bohemian scenes that you begin to suspect these chaps are enjoying the freedom of an all-male company just a little too much, but perhaps I’m just jealous.

With its dual setting, Greek tragedy and rustic comedy The Winter’s Tale is something of a curate’s egg and Propeller’s bold staging only extenuates this disparity. After the joie de vivre of Bohemia we return to sober Sicilia where all the ends have to be conveniently tied in an improbable denouement which includes a statue coming to life and more exposition than even this troop can jush-up. However, despite a somewhat uneven evening, Propeller prove once again that they are the most exciting company currently tackling the bard, balancing a rigorously intelligent approach to the text with a healthy dose of irreverence.

The Winter’s Tale continues at the Lyceum Theatre in Sheffield until Saturday 4 February.