The problems of The Winter’s Tale

“Too hot, too hot!” mutters Leontes, king of Sicilia, as he begins his slide to destruction. He is watching his wife and his lifelong friend getting on – or, as he thinks, getting it on. He is commenting on the warmth the couple generate, but he is also taking his own temperature –realising he is about to spiral out of control. Bertie Carvel made me realise this for the first time.

Carvel has always made good monsters – an overpowering Miss Trunchbull in Matilda, a treacherous husband in Doctor Foster – not least because even when most grotesque, he keeps a terrifying toe on the ground. In Yaël Farber’s production of The Winter’s Tale, he shows the jealousy that will destroy his family as a sudden attack: there is no gradual buildup of suspicion, but a shaking body, a speeding up of language, a whirling brain; you can see the bonkers fever feeding on itself.

Everything collaborates in his emotional blindness and isolation. As the fit begins, darkness falls on the stage, where Soutra Gilmour’s stark elemental design hangs a huge lead-coloured moon above the action, as if everyone were in danger of lunacy. Tim Lutkin’s lighting illuminates only Leontes, talking to himself in a swirl of smoke, cut off from everyone in his passion.

Carvel shudders it well. It is a strong episode, but not a motor for the rest of the action. Farber’s production is made up of such episodes, run through with ideas and excitements: needling music by Max Perryment accompanies the action; maenads leap; fire bursts out. Yet the vitality is local, rather than propelling throughout.

This is partly Shakespeare’s fault: The Winter’s Tale is a bumpy ride. It used to be talked of as a “problem play”, but it has proved an enticement for directors: I see it about once every two years, as often as the supposedly unproblematic Twelfth Night. The challenges of staging the improbable romance are alluring: a brooding first half in Sicily switchbacks into sunny merriment in Bohemia; tragedy turns to swaggering comedy; coincidences abound; stone is given breath as a statue comes to life.

The movement from chilly Sicilia to balmy Bohemia invites big regenenerative interpretations: Farber is not the first to emphasise the parallels to Ceres and Proserpina. Modern versions have effectively seized on other echoes. In 2001, a production by Nicholas Hytner transplanted Bohemia into Glastonbury: the move seemed to me (and to the late AS Byatt, who reviewed it on radio) completely natural. Its wit convinced me that Hytner should become the next artistic director of the National – as he shortly did.

Farber can shake a well-known play and make the stage tremble. Her 2012 production of Miss Julie, transplanted to post-apartheid South Africa, made Strindberg’s tricky drama swelter with angry emotion. Last year, she created a magnificent modern-dress King Lear, with Danny Sapani in the title role. Yet the power of The Winter’s Tale is intermittent: the action is both overfreighted with allusions and underexplained. Chunks of speeches have gone missing and much is gabbled so that it is often hard to make out what is going on.

No one should have to consult a programme to find out what sort of experience they are meant to be having in the theatre, but without recourse to this programme’s essays, most audiences will be stumped by the significance of the Eleusinian Mysteries.

Trevor Fox, who doubles as the light-fingered Autolycus and as the figure of Time, an elegant geordie with a space in one hand and a cig in the other, apparently delivers the choral ode from Brecht’s Antigone, rather than Shakespeare’s words: I still don’t understand why.

The much anticipated entry of the second most famous British bear (in Shakespeare’s day, probably conscripted from a Southwark bear-baiting ring) starts promisingly with a definite ursine silhouette, then begins to look like long-eared Egyptian god Anubis and changes again as a woman steps out of the shape.

Women are getting their own back on the patriarchy. There’s much to be welcomed in the bolstering of the female parts: a shepherd is unobtrusively turned into a shepherdess; the hey-nonny-no aspects of the rural revels – in which maidens are either dimpling or saucy – are banished.

Yet the real strength lies in Madeline Appiah’s magisterial Hermione and in Aïcha Kossoko as Paulina – occasionally overstressing the epithets in her speeches but powerful as one of Shakespeare’s most interesting creations. It is embodiment that makes the play lively, not the slide into symbol.

The Winter’s Taleis at the Royal Shakespeare theatre, Stratford-upon-Avon until 30 August

Photograph by Marc Brenner