STAGE REVIEW : Globe Offers Elegantly Cool ‘Winter’s Tale’

This has not been a great summer for Shakespeare’s “The Winter’s Tale.”

First came the dour production that launched Shakespeare Orange County. Now comes the Old Globe’s elegantly cool one. Beautiful. Rich. Detached. Where oh where has the magic fled?

Magic is all one has a right to expect from “The Winter’s Tale,” but Ralph Funicello strikes a distancing note with his setting of sliding glass panels and marble pillars topped by the suggestion of a nautical boom draped in rich fabric imitating sails. It’s a dark and gleaming ice sculpture that even the more emotional moments of this fable of love betrayed and recaptured do not entirely succeed in melting.

Without a filtering magic, this wintry tale’s improbabilities remain too raw. Leontes (George Deloy), King of Sicilia, accuses his pregnant wife, Hermione (Deborah May), of adultery with his good friend Polixenes (Vaughn Armstrong), King of Bohemia. This is an irrational conviction that even oracular refutation cannot shake.

Leontes imprisons Hermione and sends her baby, born in jail, to be abandoned in the wild. Only when the furious gods provoke the death of his young son Mamilius (Jed Larson) does Leontes repent. Too late. By then the mortified Hermione has died too.

The improbabilities mount as Antigonus (Robert Phalen) is devoured by a bear after dutifully abandoning the baby Perdita; as Perdita is found and lovingly reared by an old shepherd (Jonathan McMurtry); as Polixenes’ son Florizel (Eric Liddell) grows up to fall in love with the beautiful Perdita (Hilary James), and as the two flee to Leontes’ court to escape Polixenes’ disapproval.

All is resolved in a climactic orgy of revelation and forgiveness that brings together father and daughter, friend and friend, lover and lover, and even breathes life into a statue of Hermione, who is resurrected and joins in this apotheosis of reunion and renewal.

The circumstances cry out for a suspension of disbelief and director Jack O’Brien is well aware of it. Yet the eminently capable actors pump a life into the play that is conditioned by reserve. Emotion is kept at arm’s length.

The effect seems unintentional, with O’Brien more concerned with a truth in the moment than an overall pulse for this schizophrenic romance. The first half is a dark descent into hell, with its deaths, abandoned baby and bear chase.

The second should be brilliant with pastoral merriment, color, youth, light, love and roguish comedy (Thom Sesma makes a fine if slightly overwrought Autolycus and David Huber’s Clown strikes a happy balance between lack of intelligence and lack of education). Only at the end do the halves coalesce in a final mellow glow of absolution.

That never quite happens. Deloy’s Leontes is a deeply withdrawn creature for whom taciturnity is a natural state. If he has passions, we don’t see them, and while May, in contrast, exudes beauty and warmth as Hermione, she’s gone too soon and returns too late. When she is there, her presence is more benignly regal than it is passionate.

The passionate one is Katherine McGrath’s steadfast Paulina, Hermione’s good friend and defender. She tries in vain to stop Leontes from making his tragic mistakes, never deviating from her convictions yet remaining faithful to the court even in failure. It’s a quietly heroic role and unostentatious McGrath dominates the stage with it.

Equally dominant is Richard Easton’s plain-spoken Camillo, the loyal courtier who, unlike Paulina, flees Leontes’ temporary insanity and attaches himself to Polixenes. Easton need only stand there to seem persuasively honest, and his betrothal to the honest Paulina on his return to the Sicilian court has rarely been more fitting.

Hilary James’ quick intelligence is tempered by the innocence and sweetness so pivotal to Perdita, and Liddell seems in charge of his independence as Florizel, a role that depends largely on the actor for its perimeters.

So why is the production, graced by so many right-headed elements, still so distant? It may be the formality of that Funicello setting, under David F. Segal’s equally calculated lights. Or it may be the stern, puritanical look of those peculiar straight-across haircuts and Robert Wojewodski’s faintly Cossack costumes.

Why Cossack? The answer has to be why not? This is a fable. This Bohemia and Sicilia are not “real,” any more than this story is “real.” Under the circumstances, one wishes that the bear that kills Antigonus were a little less “real” and the pain of betrayals throughout more real and visible.

Deloy’s Leontes creates a remoteness that infiltrates the production. O’Brien as director had the power to change it. That he did not makes it a choice every bit as specific and classy as the set--and every bit as forbidding.

* “The Winter’s Tale,” Old Globe Theatre, Simon Edison Centre for the Performing Arts, Balboa Park, San Diego. Tuesdays-Sundays, 8 p.m.; Saturdays-Sundays, 2 p.m. Ends Oct. 25. $21.50-$29.50; (619) 239-2255. Running time: 2 hours, 40 minutes.

George Deloy: Leontes, King of Sicilia

Deborah May: Hermione, his wife

Jed Larson: Mamilius, their son

Richard Easton: Camillo

Robert Phalen: Antigonus

Katherine McGrath: Paulina, his wife

Vaughn Armstrong: Polixenes, King of Bohemia

Eric Liddell: Florizel, his son

Hilary James: Perdita

Jonathan McMurtry: Archidamus/Old Shepherd

David Huber: Clown, his son

Thom Sesma: Autolycus, a rogue

An Old Globe Theatre presentation of Shakespeare’s comedy. Director Jack O’Brien. Sets Ralph Funicello. Lights David F. Segal. Costumes Robert Wojewodski. Sound Jeff Ladman. Composer Bob James. Choreographer Bonnie Johnston. Dramaturge Dakin Matthews. Production stage manager Douglas Pagliotti. Stage manager Maria Carrera.