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S.F. Shakespeare's 'Cymbeline' a rollicking good time
By Pat Craig - Correspondent, The Mercury News
07/28/2011 05:28:19 PM PDT
Everything you've heard about Shakespeare's Cymbeline is probably true -- it is a play that is fantastical, overblown, impossible to believe at times and occasionally supernatural.
To understand why all of that is good, however, you must consider the work as Shakespeare's 17th-century summer blockbuster. And to appreciate it, you must see it outdoors, while huddling beneath a blanket, enjoying chips and salsa or whatever people enjoyed when the show debuted 400 years ago.
Like most summer adventure blockbusters, Cymbeline, currently traveling throughout the Bay Area as this year's San Francisco Shakespeare Festival's Free Shakespeare in the Park, is not a show to be considered on the basis of logic. It is fanciful and designed to entertain and take audiences on a breathtaking trip to places both real and imagined.
It's complicated
It begins with something not so outlandish: A humble young man, Posthumus (Craig Marker), is banished to another country because he loves Innogen (Emily Jordan), daughter of King Cymbeline (Chris Ayles), whose wife (Sharon Robinson) wants her to marry her son, Cloten (also Marker -- there's considerable double- and triple-casting in the show).
Before they are separated, Posthumus and Innogen marry, which sets their world spinning sometimes wildly off kilter. It even eventually allows for Posthumus to be convinced Innogen has been unfaithful and order her death.
That sets off a landslide of activity that includes mistaken identity, gender-bending, discovering long-missing princes, fortunetelling, soothsaying, war between England and Italy, beheadings and, most fantastical of all, a fairly happy ending.
A visual treat
It's more fun than a bucket of bottle rockets for an explosive summer night. The idea is simply to relax and let it take you on a thrill ride into the night.
Director Kenneth Kelleher creates an impressive ever-moving picture that makes the show a visual treat -- particularly a battle scene, played in slow motion across the stage.
The piece is also filled with some outstanding acting, particularly by Marker, Jordan, Ayles, Robinson and Caitlyn Louchard, who plays Pisanio. On the other side, Brian Herndon as Italian troublemaker Iachimo is a fiendish delight, and Julian Lopez-Morillas, Galen Murphy-Hoffman and Carl Holvick-Thomas, as cave-dwelling royals-in-the-woods, provide a creepy/funny overtone to the piece.
Actors move convincingly through the often far-fetched story, selling every word of it, and making it wonderfully entertaining for those willing to suspend disbelief.
Cymbeline, originally billed as a tragedy, certainly is that, but over the years, it has been considered more of a romance, and the enduring love between Posthumus and Innogen makes it that.
But overall, the show is just one rollicking, entertaining potboiler for a moody summer night.
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Emily Jordan as Innogen 
