Playfulness Is the Thing in Wacky ‘Cymbeline’

One of Shakespeare’s nuttier fruitcakes, the late romance “Cymbeline” plays as if its maker couldn’t stomach the usual formulas--his, that is--and dared himself to mess around like he’d never messed before. It’s a race between cynicism and inspiration, in which motifs pulled from seemingly all previous Shakespeare plays tumble into “a heap of self-parodies,” in the words of Shakespearean scholar Harold Bloom.

Now in a disarming production at the Old Globe Theatre, “Cymbeline” is set in ancient Britain and Rome, yet its time frame slips around from pagan era to Jacobean to whatzit. You never know where you are. Half the time the characters don’t either. The titular king of Britain is clueless throughout, more a pawn than a king. Between the iambs and prose lines of this berserk fairy tale--featuring sexual blackmail, a headless corpse and (when he’s not cut, as he has been here) the god Jupiter descending to earth on an eagle--you can hear Shakespeare murmuring to himself: How much confusion and internal contrariness can I inflict on these characters? To what degree can I screw around with audience sympathies, en route to the all’s-well?

There’s no such thing as a “straightforward” production (dubious virtue, anyway) of a play this crooked. A virtue must be made of this rarely staged work’s inability to sit still and behave.

Here, it has. Director Daniel Sullivan’s Old Globe staging lends “Cymbeline’ an air of pleasantly cheap comic pageantry. We hear it straight off in the “Fractured Fairy Tale”-meets-Fellini theme composed by Dan Moses Schreier. We see it, as a busy cast of nine gathers at the start to sing Schreier’s melody to Shakespeare’s “Fear no more,” the song bookending this goofball masque.

The nine actors play everybody and, oddly, these multiple assignations serve to clarify the story rather than muddle it. Only the talented Erika Rolfsrud tackles a single, pivotal role, that of Imogen, the king’s daughter.

She’s married to Posthumous (David Lansbury), a man beneath her station. Unhappy with the union, Cymbeline (Peter Van Norden) banishes Posthumous to Italy. There, Posthumous accepts a wager proposed by Iachimo (Tony Amendola, in costume designer Lewis Brown’s sleek, high-level Mafiosi garb), whereby if Iachimo succeeds in having his merry evil way with Imogen, Posthumous loses--and Imogen dies.

There’s more! “Cymbeline” hauls in the war between the Britons and the Romans, won according to Shakespeare by the king’s presumed-dead sons (Dylan Chalfy and Brian Lohmann), raised in Wales by another Cymbeline banish-ee, Belarius. He’s played here by a she, Brenda Wehle, in an exceptionally effective bit of cross-dressed casting. Wehle also takes on the evil Queen, whose son by her first marriage is a clot named Cloten (Lansbury again), stalking Imogen, attended by a deeply conflicted aide named Pisanio (James Saba).

Director Sullivan’s recent Geffen Playhouse “Hedda Gabler” played as if he’d taken an oath of non-interpretation. Here, a different story. This isn’t a troubling or truly provocative take on the play; it’s a playful, often inventive one. Early on, Sullivan loads up so heavily o1847620712gags, you think you’re in for it. But then he nails a key encounter between the paranoid Posthumous and the scheming weasel Iachimo. The underpinnings are thereby pinned down quite nicely.

In all the right ways Riccardo Hernandez’s scenic design pins nothing down. He presents a gold-framed stage-within-a-stage, surrounded by symbols of various centuries: cannons, soldiers, a 1930s radio, a dirigible, even a scooter. (The 1989 JoAnne Akalaitis staging of “Cymbeline” in New York had Imogen scooting around Wales on just such a scooter.) When the action shifts to Rome, we’re treated with a brief backstage glimpse of what appears to be the opera “Salome,” complete with decapitated head--a witty foreshadowing of what befalls Cloten later in the play.

Sullivan and company don’t always seem sure of their effects. (The comic-relief battle, with Britons fighting Cabbage Patch-style Roman mannequins, is just stupid.) I wish actor Lansbury could find a way to distinguish the rage of Cloten from that of Posthumous--this guy loves his rage, period--yet he’s a forceful presence. The wee cast imparts a sense of esprit. Far from perfect, this “Cymbeline” nonetheless skips right along; it’s fun.

Rolfsrud’s Imogen lends it surprising gravity as well. She manages to pull from potentially risible scenes--her discovery of the headless body, for example--a genuine sense of pain and grief. You may wonder, at such junctures, who changed the channel. That, folks, is Shakespeare’s play all over.

* “Cymbeline,” Old Globe Theatre, Balboa Park, San Diego. Tuesdays-Fridays, 8 p.m.; Saturdays, 2 and 8 p.m.; Sundays, 2 and 7 p.m. Ends Sept. 4. $23-$39. (619) 239-2255. Running time: 2 hours, 50 minutes.

“Cymbeline”

Tony Amendola: Iachimo/Caius Lucius/British Captain

Dylan Chalfy: Second Gentleman/Arviragus/Helen/Frenchman

David Lansbury: Posthumus Leonatus/Cloten

Brian Lohmann: First Gentleman/Cornelius/Philario/Guidarius

Erika Rolfsrud: Imogen

James Saba: Pisanio/Messenger/British Lord/Gaoler

Peter Van Norden: Cymbeline/Gaoler/Roman Captain

Brenda Wehle: Queen/Belarius

Written by William Shakespeare. Directed by Daniel Sullivan. Set design by Riccardo Hernandez. Costumes by Lewis Brown. Lighting by Pat Collins. Original music by Dan Moses Schreier. Sound by Jeff Ladman. Dramaturgy by Dakin Matthews. Fight direction by Steve Rankin. Stage manager Joel Rosen.