Domestic conflict

The Winter’s Tale
Old Vic

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Douglas Murray

Britain is losing friends – and making enemies

Phèdre
Lyttelton

I seem to be alone in feeling great waves of pity for anyone involved in an assault on The Winter’s Tale. This strange dud of a text remains mystifyingly popular with theatre folk. It’s two plays shunted together. Act one is a mawkish palace tragedy, act two is a pastoral operetta with lots of songs and larky rhetoric and a silly happy ending. The play’s central character, Leontes, is a sexual paranoid who accuses his best friend of adultery, slings his pregnant wife in jail and sends their newborn baby into exile. Later he finds out he was mistaken. They’re all innocent. Contrition breaks over him. But just as his jealousy was unconvincing so his remorse is unaffecting. His character is both repugnant and illegible, a miaowing tiger pacing a tiny cage, a cold and tedious tyrant lodged in a prosaic world of domestic conflict.