On 3 March 2025, a group of staff and students from the Department of English, led by  Dr Lesel Dawson and Dr Laurence Publicover, attended a production of The Winter’s Tale at the Tobacco Factory Theatre in Southville. Perhaps most famous for its stage direction ‘Exit, pursued by a bear’, this play, written near the end of Shakespeare’s career, tells the story of a jealous king, Leontes, who wrongfully accuses his wife, Hermione, of infidelity with his best friend, Polixenes. We won’t offer a full plot summary here (it’s quite convoluted!), but suffice to say that, this being a tragicomedy (or ‘romance’), there’s a lot of pain and suffering before things are mostly – thought not entirely – resolved: a stunning climax has Hermione, for sixteen years thought dead, return to the world, appearing to transform from marble statue into warm flesh.

The Winter’s Tale is the final of five Shakespeare plays studied on a second-year unit taken by around 150 single- and joint-honours English students, and so everyone was familiar with the plot; but as the students reported, there is always something additional we see or reflect on when seeing a play performed. ‘I noticed lots of interesting details that I hadn't picked up on when studying the play’, Louis Fowler reported, adding, ‘it has made me want to go and watch every Shakespeare play live, which is how they are supposed to be experienced’.

Matilda Muir agreed, attesting that the performance enhanced especially her understanding of Paulina, the noblewomen who stands up to Leontes during his tyrannical jealousy: ‘Being able to see her on stage, surrounded by men, being the sole voice of reason, made me understand the gravitas of her character a lot more’. Karis Hall was similarly struck by the performance of an ‘unrelenting’ Paulina, while also remarking that reflecting on ‘the creative choices’ made by the production’s creative team helped her consider other areas of her degree—specifically, parts where she’s ‘looking at the translation of texts, from poetry to animation and other areas’.

How about those key scenes? The ‘death-by-bear’ episode was quite unusually staged: the sails of a ship became a screen behind which we saw the silhouette of a roaring figure, who, when the cloth was rolled back, transpired to be Leontes. Matilda thought it ‘done with a lot of dignity’, while also saying that seeing the play in performance allowed her better to appreciate how difficult The Winter’s Tale is to stage on a small budget (without, at least, it becoming ‘goofy’). There was a mixed response to the famous ‘statue’ scene. Matilda found it ‘incredibly moving’, and Louis thought it done ‘very tenderly’; Karis, by contrast, found it ‘saccharine’, quite rightly pointing out that there’s the potential in this final scene for Hermione to display ‘resistance’ to the notion that Leontes’s appalling deeds can be forgiven (Hermione speaks to her daughter in the scene, but not, interestingly, to her husband). Louis felt that the scene brought the best out of the actor playing Leontes, noting that he reacted ‘very aptly, with the perfect mix of euphoria, incredulity and fear’, and calling it ‘the high point of his role’.

The most praise, however, was reserved for the performance of Hermione, with the students picking up on an especially effective production decision within a less-celebrated scene: having Hermione, at her trial scene, dressed in the blood-stained nightdress in which (we were to assume) she’d recently given birth. ‘It was so effective in translating that Hermione has just given birth, given her blood for this new child, and Leontes has thrown it all in her face’, remarked Karis. ‘I don’t know why more productions don't decide to do this’, Matilda added, ‘because it was incredibly effective, and made the whole trial scene more devastating’. As so often, you go to a play anticipating certain things, and are then struck by decisions you hadn’t anticipated, or you hear lines delivered in ways that cause you to reorient your understanding of a character or episode. All attendees are very grateful to Lesel and Laurence for organising the trip and to the School of Humanities for funding it.