I have yet to blog about my last theatre trip so let me rectify that right.... now.

Last week Owen and I braved the wilds of The Cut and went to see Sam Mendes' production of Shakespeare's A WINTER'S TALE at the Old Vic, one of the two plays playing in rep there by the rather self-importantly named The Bridge Project. This is the company formed by Mendes' own company, The Old Vic and the Brooklyn Academy of Music. All very auspicious... is it any cop?All the publicity for the company has been about the amalgamation of British and US actors to serve plays by Shakespeare and Chekhov. Not a new idea... Kenneth Branagh foistered the Anglo-American idea casting idea through his Shakespeare films and Mendes' final productions at the Donmar were - you guessed - Shakespeare & Chekhov.

Well, it's a production of two halves - but not as you would expect. For all the talk of creating a harmonious mix of talents, THE WINTER'S TALE has the austere court of Sicilia peopled by British actors and the neighbouring country of Bohemia is full of American accents. I preferred Sicilia and I think Sam Mendes did too.
Simon Russell Beale is - unsurprisingly - the focal point of the evening as Leontes who finds himself wracked with a consuming jealousy over the friendship between his pregnant Queen Hermione and his oldest friend Polixenes, the King of Bohemia. Russell Beale was excellent, charting Leontes' slow, creeping jealousy with his usual lyricism and wonderful ear for the verse. However his clear and precise reading rubs uneasily against the sing-song delivery of Josh Hamilton - whose strident American accent jarred enormously in the opening scene - and Rebecca Hall's slightly over-emphatic Hermione.

His fine performance is equalled by Sinead Cusack as a fiercely loyal Paulina (although not eclipsing memories of Deborah Finley at the National a few years ago) and Paul Jesson's sympathetic Camillo. However when the action moves to Bohemia the production falters badly. Although Richard Easton and Tobias Segal had some nice moments as the shepherds and Ethan Hawke certainly lent some Johnny Depp-style Hollywood glamour to the conniving Autolycus, Mendes plays the festival sequence like an am-dram production of "Oklahoma". There is also a dance routine with balloons used as boobs and willies which left the audience looking like the one in "The Producers". How it managed to make it from the rehearsal room to the stage is beyond me.

On the whole I enjoyed it when Simon Russell Beale and Sinead Cusack were on stage - Beale truly breaks your heart in the famous revelation scene at the end of the play with the line "O she's warm!" when he touches Hermione's hand - and I suspect the uneven tone would be absent from the companion play "The Cherry Orchard".