THE WINTER'S TALE

25/7/09, Old Vic

3hrs. Simon Russell Beale as Leontes, Rebecca Hall as Hermione, Ethan Hawke as Autolycus. Sam Mendes directed. Part of the "The Bridge", a scheme to mount six productions with a single company of British and American actors on Broadway, on tour and at the Vic. This first effort plays in rep with Chekhov's The Cherry Orchard, which we aren't planning to see.

Simon Russell Beale as ever mesmerising. What that man can do with a silence! There's a moment in the latter part of this play where he sees his daughter Perdita for the first time since she was abandoned as a newborn. He doesn't know it's her. He says nothing but simply looks at her, and manages somehow to convey recognition, astonishment, doubt, love, disbelief, guilt... The production was worth seeing for that moment alone. It brought tears to the eyes. And of course he speaks the verse, including some of Shakespeare's thorniest constructions, as if new-minted dialogue, excavating the meaning (not perhaps always what Shakespeare intended, but none the worse for that) and making it crystal clear.

Hawke played Autolycus as an itinerant country and western ballad singer with guitar. It worked surprisingly well: the shepherds' harvest feast became a hoe-down. He made the characters' nonsense songs sound plausible. And there were some funny jokes. The costumes placed the production at the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries; the Americans played the Bohemians, the Brits the Sicilians.

Rebecca Hall was unconvincing as Hermione (too young, frankly), Sinead Cusack was brilliant as Paulina, the older woman who reads Leontes the riot act over his treatment of his wife and then squirrels the supposedly dead Hermione away for 16 years until revealing her as a statue on the occasion of her daughter's return. Which has to be almost as unlikely a plot development as the murder of the courtier who abandons the infant Perdita, only to be torn limb from limb by a bear. The bear was well-handled: there was the inevitable laugh, but the creature was scary enough -- a man in a bear costume prowling menacingly in the half-dark. In the end there was no "Exit, pursued by a bear", just a slash of lightning, the bear rears up, then blackout. But why, one wonders, did Shakespeare specify a bear? Scary, sure. You only had to pop down the road to the bear-baiting to see how scary. But a trifle too exotic? Perhaps someone had given the company a bear skin and they were looking for some way to use it.

The statue coming to life was handled well. Hermione stood on a dais downstage with her back to the audience, the other characters in a semi-circle facing her (and us). When she came to life it was as though she were waking from a trance.

The Vic stage had been remodelled, with a forestage (lower than the main stage) in front of the proscenium and a sloping playing area linking main and fore stages.

Clever lighting. There was much use of bright white spotlights (though more diffuse than a conventional follow spot), which illuminated characters during soliloquies (it might have been over the top but actually worked fine); great geometrical slabs of light on the floor at certain points like the opening of the final section, when Leontes and friends sit disconsolate in a great cathedral-like space conjured up by lighting alone; and when Hermione reanimated the gloom lifted... on Perdita before the others.

The play remains fundamentally implausible. Apart from the bear and the statue, Leontes' jealousy at the start is simply a given: there's no Othello-like development or explanation for his condition. His emotions seem irrational -- though his brother Polixenes' fury when he sees his son proposing to Perdita seems equally over the top and implies that irrational mood swings may be a family failing.

It's a play that shows the fragility of the things we love and depend on -- even if, in this romance, they are (mostly) restored.

VICKY CRISTINA BARCELONA

27/2/09, Hyde Park Picture House, Leeds. 1hr 30 mins.

The Hyde Park is the kind of old-fashioned little cinema you don't think can possibly survive: on a suburban corner in the student neighbourhood, a single auditorium, ticket office facing the street, sweet concession in the tiny foyer.

http://www.olsenorsen.org/about.html

Cinemas like this deserve better films: a Woody Allen picture with Rebecca Hall, Scarlett Johansson, Javier Bardem, Penelope Cruz. A self-indulgent romp with some wit but few real jokes, relying far too heavily on a voice-over narrator and the undoubted physical charms of its stars and its settings (Barcelona and Oviedo).

A film that tries to have its pastel and eat it. It gently mocks the notion of the holiday romance. But it wallows in the gorgeous scenery, the tourist-board images of fountains and guitars and Spanish countryside and picturesque bars and villas inhabited by wealthy, yacht-owning expats.

Sensible Vicky (Rebecca Hall, pitch-perfect American accent), soon to be married to equally sensible (and boring... but affluent) Doug, comes with her dippy friend Cristina to Barcelona. Vicky is studying Catalan culture. Cristina is trying to find herself. They meet up with Bardem as a brooding but unfeasibly charming and sexy artist who, like the man in My Fair Lady, oils his way across the floor, oozing charm at every pore. He announces he'd like to make love to both of them and within an hour has whisked them off in the middle of the night in a light aircraft to Oviedo, despite sensible Vicky's thoroughly sensible misgivings.

This is performance as self-parody: fun but unconvincing. In due course Cristina and the artist become lovers (but not before Vicky has succumbed to all that oil), only for the idyll to be disrupted by the arrival of his ex-wife, a suicidal spitfire with a tempestuous temperament and Cruz's good looks: another exercise in self-parody. He can't live without her; together they tear each other to pieces.

The movie looks up whenever Cruz is around (which is presumably why they gave her the best supporting actress Oscar, though it isn't deserved). There's a wonderful moment towards the end when Vicky, newly-married, has succumbed to temptation and is allowing herself to be seduced by the artist when Cruz comes in brandishing, and indeed firing, a gun.

It might have been a far more interesting film without Vicky and Cristina in it at all. But then I suppose it wouldn't have been a Woody Allen picture. Though to be candid I'm not sure what that means these days, because I've seen only one since Annie Hall in 1977 (though I may have seen Manhattan a couple of years after that). His reputation and the critics put me off: I somehow think his films must be self-indulgent, feature insufficiently sympathetic people and be insufficiently funny.

That's a fair description of VCB, but not of the only other film I've seen, Sweet and Lowdown with Sean Penn and Samantha Morton, which I remember was sweet and touching and convincing in its picture of the world of itinerant jazz musicians in the 1950s (or maybe 1930s: it was a long time ago).