'Cymbeline' review — women rule in this astonishingly smart gender-flipped take on Shakespeare's late play

Read our review of Cymbeline, starring Martina Laird and Gabrielle Brooks, now in performances at the Sam Wanamaker Playhouse to 20 April.

It’s ladies’ night at the Sam Wanamaker Playhouse where the winter repertory season opens with Cymbeline in a ravishing production that marks the directorial debut at this address of Jennifer Tang. The production will be joined in due course by a new take on Three Sisters, whose very title promises women pride of place.

Shakespeare’s strange but always-fascinating late play isn’t known for its Sapphic emphases. But some astonishingly smart gender-flipping and textual tweaks forefront female union and solidarity in a dramatic picaresque that also confronts less pleasant topics: domestic betrayal, warfare, and a notable beheading are all given their due.

That last event is greeted in the text with perhaps one of the least expected questions in all Shakespeare: “What trunk is here without his top?”. That this moment of discovery prompts comedy along the way to a finale suffused with feeling honours Tang’s ability to find an emotional throughline to a sometimes wayward text; I noted more than one spectator wiping away tears at the end.

We hear in a freshly minted opening (i.e. not by Shakespeare) of “an island adrift in a sea of men”, which in turn introduces us to Martina Laird’s elegantly spoken queen, Cymbeline, hair trailing behind her with follicular splendour. Her realm worships the earth goddess, Gaia, and an otherworldly air attends Laura Moody’s shimmering score.

The music, in turn, is played by musicians perched atop the action whose “orchestra” consists of an arresting array of found objects (pots, stones and the like), their sounds added to by peculiar yelps, clucks, and seeming lamentations that ramp up the prevailing aural surprise. “Fear no more the heat o’ the sun” – the song that remains this play’s greatest textual takeaway – is here performed with genuine choral beauty, as if ready to be gifted to the classical music canon.

Cymbeline, normally a king, gives this 1610 play its title, but its pivotal figure is surely Innogen (more commonly referenced as Imogen), whose name was in fact co-opted as the title of Matthew Dunster’s 2016 Globe production of this play. The vagaries of romance between Gabrielle Brooks’s superb Innogen and Nadi Kemp-Sayfi’s impassioned Posthumus, raised within the royal household, drive the newly queer narrative.

There’s little point in demanding logic as the play swerves through its pile-up of seduction, deception, and disguise. Amanda Bright’s splendidly open-faced Pisania, Posthumus’s servant, speaks of being “perplexed in awe”, and that about sums it up.

At times, some of the male performances in particular come close to caricature, though Pierre Niel-Mee shifts gears on cue as the oily, sexually predatory Iachimo who by play’s end learns the error of his ways. And Jordan Mifsud is evidently having a field day as the clottish Cloten, Cymbeline’s stepson, who gets off on sniffing his own armpits.

The beating heart of the piece is provided throughout by Brooks, a standout last summer here in The Comedy of Errors, who is developing into one of the most electric young Shakespeareans around. (It’s doubly astonishing that her one Olivier nomination for date should be for playing Rita Marley, Bob Marley’s wife, in the West End.) It may be Posthumus who gets the climactic advisory – desperately needed these days – to “deal with others better”, but Brooks heads a company who genuinely rank among this theatre’s best in recent years.

Cymbeline is at the Sam Wanamaker Playhouse to 20 April. Book Cymbeline tickets on LondonTheatre.co.uk

Photo credit: Cymbeline (Photos by Marc Brenner)