Yaël Farber. The clue is in the name, and its German root, meaning 'colour'. Farber is a colorist. Rather than approaching Shakespeare through literary analysis, she wields hues, images and symbols. She directs as if she were a painter. Like her thrilling Macbeth at the Almeida, her Winter's Tale is, first and foremost, a feast for the senses.
And it's a hearty meal. This production boasts movement and dance pulsing with pagan might, constant rhythmic music like electro-Stravinsky, elemental powers of earth, air, fire and water, the blue of a winter sky, and the gold of a summer solstice.
Above it all, suspended like a watchful deity, is a gigantic moon. I've seen moons on stage before - projections, cutouts in cycloramas, beams of twinkling light. But I've never seen one like this: cold, old, beautiful, vast, with a surface slowly evolving under wisps of ever-changing shadow.
If ever a set was a symbol, this is it. That moon stands for change and femininity, the two themes underpinning Farber's vision of this haunting play.
The femininity resides in the patriarchy-crushing maternal characters, Hermione, Paulina and the Shepherdess. Hermione, wronged wife of the inexplicably jealous King Leontes, in Madeline Appiah's hands, is as statuesque as the sculpture she seems to become. She forgives Leontes, but only when he is grovelling at her feet. Paulina may already be one of Shakespeare's highest-status female roles, a direct inheritor of Emilia's mighty mantle, but, played by Aicha Kossoko, she becomes a figure of near-mystical power, a moon-mother. And completing the trio of maternal dominance is Amelda Brown as the Shepherdess. This role, normally both male and comical, transforms convincingly into that of a surrogate mother, and Farber swaps the humour for sincere emotion. Guided by these three figures of feminine inspiration, abandoned daughter Perdita was bound to make it home to Sicilia in the end.
There would have been a fourth female lead. But sadly the unique Kathryn Hunter, due to play both Autolycus and the anthropomorphised figure of Time itself, had to pull out late in the rehearsal process. As anyone who has seen Joel Coen's film The Tragedy of Macbeth will tell you, Hunter specialises in supernatural female figures. Her Gollum-like, contorted witches are the highlight of the film, and her Time would have been awesome.
In place of Hunter, the dual role is taken by Trevor Fox, and he still manages to make it the highlight of the show. In Shakespeare's original, Time only appears between Acts Three and Four, popping up to explain the gap of sixteen years. Farber has expanded the role, bringing in modern extracts from Sophocles' Antigone (a particularly appropriate choice given the Greek roots of The Winter's Tale), and having Fox act as an omniscient narrator in the guise of a mystical Geordie vagrant from the very start of the play. When he transforms into the con-man Autolycus in Act Four he does not cease to be Time, but rather seems to walk among the mortals, an Eternal in disguise.
And speaking of Act Four, the ever-problematic Sheep-Shearing Festival that dominates it (and can be both incomprehensible and interminable to modern audiences) is, in this production, the heart of the evening. There isn't any shearing; in fact there isn't a sheep in sight. Instead, what we get is a wild, pagan ritual that conjures Proserpine from the dead and celebrates the death and resurrection of the corn god, all beneath the fluctuating face of that louring moon. It invokes cycles of time and tradition, and feels deeply linked to some ancient power in Mother Earth. Contrasted with the cold, lifeless court of Leontes, Bohemia is the land of rebirth. It's more Midsommar than A Midsummer Night, and the wildness is infectious. Even the bear is a kind of female Dionysus, sweeping aside not only the ill-fated courtier Antigonus, but the entire, barren worldview he represents.
Set against all this Bacchanalian revelry, Bertie Carvel's Leontes is a little insipid. His lines are foaming with jealous rage ('Inch-thick, knee-deep, o'er head and ears a fork'd one') but Carvel delivers them with almost polite offence rather than spitting, green-eyed mania. He seems less like a man who has drunk and seen the spider, and more like one who has sipped and seen the Sweetex. It may be that Farber's intention is to diminish Leontes' presence while strengthening that of the women, but, as Paulina says, his behaviour should 'savour of tyranny'.
Nevertheless, the final scene, in which (spoiler) Hermione is restored and our Perdita is found, more than lives up to its reputation as one of Shakespeare's moments of supreme, paradisal radiance. When Leontes whispers 'O she's warm', there are audible gasps and sobs, even from those who know the story. Bohemia and Sicilia, and everything they represent, are finally united. The magic has worked. Love and emotion have triumphed over logic and interpretation. Perhaps that's what happens when you direct a play with feelings and instincts. You get Farbe: colours.