The Swan, Stratford-upon-Avon
They're billing this at Stratford as Shakespeare's "Lost Play" Re-Imagined. The inverted commas are well placed, since it's a matter of surmise how much of it is really by the Bard himself. But what we get is an extraordinary and theatrically powerful piece, adapted and directed by Gregory Doran from a variety of sources; one that should both please audiences and keep academic scholars in work for years.
The provenance is complex. We know that a play called The History of Cardenio, attributed to Fletcher and Shakespeare and based on a story in Don Quixote, was performed in 1613. We also know that a play called Double Falsehood written by Lewis Theobald, and supposedly based on the lost Shakespearean manuscript, was played at Drury Lane in 1727.
But what Doran has done, with the assistance of the Spanish dramatist Antonio Alama, is to to graft Thomas Shelton's version of the Cervantes story on to Theobald's text. Far from being a mad, bits-and-pieces patchwork, the result is a strangely coherent and ultimately moving drama.
But how much of it is Shakespeare? Well, the play is as full of echoes as a whispering gallery. The basic theme is that of false friendship as embodied by Fernando: an Andalucian libertine who rapes the lowly Dorotea, and then abandons her in order to wed Luscinda – who just happens to be the intended bride of his chum, Cardenio. All this has echoes of Two Gentlemen of Verona. But when Dorotea dons male disguise to pursue Fernando, we are in All's Well That Ends Well country. Meanwhile, poor Cardenio impotently seeks revenge like a Hispanic Hamlet. And the ending, with its double marriage and tide of forgiveness and reconcilation, is straight out of the late romances.
My own unscholarly guess is that, for all the Bardic motifs, this is more Fletcher than Shakespeare. As reconstructed, the piece certainly shows Fletcher's eye for a strong dramatic situation. Fernando's violation of Dorotea and subsequent guilty evasiveness might have come out of a number of Jacobean plays. The aborted wedding of Fernando and Luscinda, which a paralysed Cardenio oversees, also smacks of Fletcher. But, although Shakespeare presumably had a hand in the work, at no point does the language achieve that blend of the high poetic and the quotidian that is his trademark.
What matters, however, is that the play works beautifully in Doran's richly textured production: one adorned with an abundance of Catholic ritual, dance-filled fiestas, and the blend of sex and death that marks the Spanish temper.
There's also some glorious acting from a fine RSC ensemble. Alex Hassell as the impetuous, ultimately penitent Fernando, Oliver Rix as the guileless Cardenio, Pippa Nixon as the maritally determined Dorotea, and Lucy Briggs-Owen as faithful and luscious Luscinda, are all first-rate. The senior generation is also staunchly represented by Christopher Godwin and Nicholas Day as, respectively, peppery and snobbish fathers.
In the end, the play feels pseudo-Shakespearean rather than an authentic part of the canon. But I leave that debate to academics. What Doran and his team, including designer Niki Turner and composer Paul Englishby, have created is an engrossing theatrical event that, among many other things, proves that Cervantes had a profound effect on English cultural life.