Director Jennifer Tang on theatre in 2025, gender-swapping and her 'slightly bonkers' Cymbeline

Born in the South East of England to Cantonese parents and permanently fostered by a white British family, director Jennifer Tang is a champion of the underrepresented. And her involvement in the casting of her brand new production of Cymbeline at London's Sam Wanamaker Playhouse has ensured the spectacle is teeming with diversity. In terms of the Shakespearean canon, the play itself has been somewhat underrepresented over the centuries, so perhaps this is a perfect pairing.

More famous for comprising of almost all narrative plot devices known to the early modern theatre than for actually being performed, William Shakespeare's Cymbeline is Britain's national playwright in his final throes.

We're probably too far out from the pandemic to compare how the play's delivery near to Christmas in 1610 came hard on the heels of a plague-related closure, but issues of nationalism certainly plagued James I and VI as it preoccupies our own age. Yet, Jennifer Tang's new production at the gaspingly beautiful Sam Wanamaker Playhouse has little of that to chew on but much to recommend it.

Gender-fluid Druids?

Cymbeline, here, is not a King of Ancient Britain but a Queen. It's nothing new to change the protagonist's gender, indeed one almost expects something that runs contrary to an 'establishment' performance, but the real test is if it hinders the storytelling. Which I have to say it did at the outset and for the very reason that it was guided by concept instead of narrative. The King becomes the Queen, so the original Queen (the almost archetypal evil stepmother) becomes a Duke. The character whom the play is really about despite it being called Cymbeline (much like Henry IV parts one and two are about Prince Hal) is Imogen - Tang chooses the more obscure spelling of Innogen, as she found it more beautiful - and she stays a she, but her love object, Posthumous, is made female to create a gay relationship at the centre of the play. Oh and any references to Jupiter (this is set in the pre-Christian era) are changed to 'Gaia' the earth mother.

Tang's pre-occupation with creating a floor-to-ceiling Matriarchy does little to detangle a play that, even in its original form, obfuscates more and more as it jackknifes along to a conclusion that would leave Hamlet's Polonius with a real categorisation struggle.

Scholars have fought over the taxonomy, but the packed out press night audience filed out onto the freezing South Bank in full acceptance that, after a brilliantly maniacal second half, this one ended up being played for laughs, even if some of them were unintentional.

"I've only ever directed one of the Shakespeare in my life and that was the Tempest in 2023 at Regent's Park Open Air Theatre," Tang tells Euronews Culture. "And that was made for young people and families. We threw in lots of new contemporary songs to help reiterate the story for young people. The thing that was really freeing about that process was making it clear to folks who might not know the story already. And I sort of wanted to bring that same mission to Cymbeline."

If you have a solid concept, you have to stick to it. But you also need it to sit easy with the text you have in front of you, or risk the audience losing viewer momentum from time to time. That said, a little learning is a dangerous thing and those of us with a modicum of familiarity with the text will be jarred by changes far more than the majority who come to it fresh. Indeed the 'earth mother' element has its own grounds for inclusion. "The ground that gave them first has them again," says Belarius in Act 4. And although 'ground' is swapped to 'earth', Tang's choice is justified.

Problem play?

Shakespeare literacy can even be tricky for scholars who, over the centuries, have found Cymbeline hard to put into the right box. The play can be found in collections of Shakespeare's tragedies but it can also be found in collections of his comedies. It has been called a romance, it has, less often, been claimed as a Roman play, and Tang adds another category to the mix by suggesting it's a 'problem play', although this classification traditionally only contains Measure for Measure, All's Well That Ends Well, and Troilus and Cressida. I'm siding with Tang.

"Once I'd read the play, formed my own opinion of it, sort of on my first read I went, okay, this is slightly bonkers, how are we going to make sense of this?," Tang explains. "And I think this idea of it being a problem play does relate to the fact that nobody can quite get a sense of its genre. And that's partly why I think I fell in love with the play. I'm sort of really interested in the grey areas between. And this idea of it being a problem play...you know, is it a romance? Is it a tragedy? Is it a comedy? I just think that's life, isn't it?"

It's not only categorisation that befuddles. There is also location and period. Cymbeline has always been between worlds thanks to an era-shifting setting that presents Ancient Britain, Ancient Rome and Renaissance Italy. This gives designers of set and costume some room to manoeuvre, and Megan Rarity of the costume department created some fusion dishes here that range from Cossacks to TK Maxx.

"When Basia (Biñkowska, designer) and I were thinking about how to land this, the production design, we were really interested in it being pagan and ancient, but we were also really interested in it not being completely historically accurate and specific," Tang qualifies. "We didn't really want it to be a museum piece and saying 'this is set in 49 AD and look at the spears, they're completely accurate!'"

And although Rarity's delicious Burgundy two-pieces that signify the Roman characters catch the eye, the sub-plot of the Empire's demands of fiscal fealty from the Britons is given very little weight. Focus is given instead to the relationships and the characterisation, although the latter were (depending on your viewing proximity) sometimes writ too large for such an intimate theatre.

But not in the case of Martina Laird whose impressive regality and internal power were a delight, and her stress-mannerisms perhaps the apotheosis of Movement Director Chi-San Howard's flow design. Something between sign language and the kinesics of Polynesian dance pervaded the production majestically, accompanied by Laura Moody’s fascinating minimalist soundtrack. This atmosphere was enhanced immeasurably by the theatre itself.

The Sam Wanamaker Playhouse

A structure of green oak inside a shell of brickwork, the playhouse is modelled on the theatres of the late renaissance and is lit for performance by over one hundred real beeswax candles.

Tang admits she couldn't get away from the power of the space.

"The Wanamaker is beautiful and, in lots of ways, the design is already inherent in the space," she says. "And to fight it, you know, you might want to fight it, but it feels like you're up against quite a fight there! The Wanamaker's lit by candles and this big question for me was how do we make sense of the candles in this world? So actually thinking about the candles in conjunction with Cymbeline and the fact that she is a grieving mother who's lost her children, it felt like we could sort of set up the idea that the candles are part of her remembrance, her vigil for the twins."

To watch Shakespeare in this extraordinary space is nothing short of magical, and when the music moves from soundscape to full-on song for 'Fear no more the heat o' th' sun', the whole building vibrates with the gorgeous, moving arrangement.

The stone-clicking soundscape ramps up the drama throughout and provides atmosphere in symbiosis with the earth mother concept and Shakespeare's myriad botanical metaphors.

And while being reminiscent of the sort of noise that got Yoko’s microphone turned off during Lennon's jam with Chuck Berry, a pharyngeal cawing provided a visceral wildness to an already mesmerising aural tapestry that was afforded additional presence by the framing of the musicians in the top panels of the theatre, giving them an almost godly aspect. 

Adoption

Scholar Erin Ellerbeck writes in the programme notes, "Cymbeline and Belarius are reimagined as female characters, and the power of familial composition and recombination is placed in the hands of mothers."

As a child brought up in care herself, Tang has a natural fascination with the nature vs nurture argument. With a female Cymbeline and a female Belarius (Belaria) you have the whole adoption story centred on women. One that gave birth to the two kidnapped royal children and the other who fostered them and later became the agency that brought them home. Tang elaborates:

"The twin story is a really central part of Cymbeline's story. It was one of the reasons why changing Cymbeline to a woman felt quite important to me. The idea of a mother losing her two children, but importantly for me was the story of Belaria, the foster mother or the adoptive mother losing her two children as well. And having grown up with a foster mother who goes through that process of losing children when the foster family is brought to an end, you know, it felt, that felt like an important part of the story to me."

Bathos and cadence

For the press night audience this play had one eye on comedy in the first half and both eyes in the second. One of the most enjoyable devices, and one at which the cast seemed extremely adept, was the switching of intonation to a modern delivery which did a number of things. It thrust (there was a LOT of thrusting) the performance into the 21st century; it demonstrated Shakespeare's timelessness; it brought a modern comic sensibility; and it gradually trained the audience to laugh when it was employed.

Aaron's Anthony's pointed "What art though?" to the villainous Cloten allowed early modern English to sound everyday. It’s an intonation that any playwright would adore, another era providing a mode for a more immediate transmission of the story. 

Gabrielle Brooks imbued her Innogen with the same ability. Her tonal switch on “I can see you’re angry” was an immediate trigger for the audience to laugh, as was Madeline Appiah's incredulous barking of "What? How, how?" in her wonderful, husky South London twang which could have been an outburst of shock and disgust on Jeremy Kyle.

Interestingly, and perhaps fittingly for a play in the problem category, this can create an emotional volte-face. When the Duke's death was announced during the resolutions and furore of a truly Shakespearean Act V, there is hysterical uproar and guffaws from all tiers.

"I guess when Pisania comes in and says, the Duke is dead, there's just something that is very direct and is completely 2025," Tang says. "Maybe it's more about the immediacy of the language."

From this moment, there could be no other method of delivery. The audience were on a course that could not be altered. But I got the feeling it wasn't necessarily planned. Tang is refreshingly honest.

"In the first few previews, I was really unsure how to feel when audiences were laughing in the final scene. You know, folks are gasping, folks are laughing, folks are crying sometimes. And by the time we opened I'd just become thankful that people are engaged enough to have a response. Because it's quite a vocal response that people are having. And I think that just shows the success of the story that Shakespeare's written, that it's engaging enough to make us vocally gasp or laugh or cry. And as long as people are responding in some way, I think the story has done its job."

State of Play

Tang's Cymbeline goes some way to show that, as a production in 2025, the culture of celebrity and safe programming does not permeate the whole of London's major theatre scene. But it's a comparatively small theatre, and won't be a massive springboard for change. Tang feels it keenly:

"I think personally we're in a sticky place. It's hard. I think we're still feeling the repercussions of Covid in an indirect way, mainly through money because audiences haven't quite returned. Theatres are, and organisations are, crippled by having to sort of manage their way through that crisis and, and having to make programming choices that will continue to shore up their futures and get us through this sticky point. But you know, those programming choices have repercussions on the theatre ecology of nurturing artists - and not just the artists that exist now, but the next generation of artists coming through. It's sad and it's hard and I don't necessarily think anyone or anything is to blame. It's just where we are and it's the fight for survival."

Cymbeline runs until April 20th 2025