Shakespeare’s early British monarch is reimagined as a queen heading a matriarchy – and overseeing the mother of all dysfunctional “blended” families. Her queer daughter, Innogen (Gabrielle Brooks), has married her girlfriend, Posthumus (Nadi Kemp-Sayfi) without Cymbeline’s permission. Her second husband, Duke (Silas Carson), is plotting against his wife and manoeuvring to line up his son, Cloten (Jordan Mifsúd), for the throne. Both parents are trying to get their children – step-siblings – to marry.
The production’s gender inversions are set amid Shakespeare’s melodrama, involving everything from poison plotting by the Duke to the kidnapping of royal children and Cymbeline’s war with Rome. Among it all, the matriarchy does not quite resonate in its significance or even feel especially revisionist, perhaps because the play’s prevailing themes speak of family relationships and parental responsibility over an examination of power – the latter is not prominently examined here.
