Love comes with strings attached in Greg Doran’s tragic romance. First performed 22 years ago, this enchanting production of Shakespeare’s great poem of unrequited love is now tenderly narrated by Simon Russell Beale. With masterful puppetry and a playful air of seduction, there’s no wonder this conjuring of Venus’s pursuit of the handsome Adonis has had so many lives. Like love – and heartbreak – its magic is timeless.
No breath is wasted with these cheeky puppets, wooden in material only, designed and created by Lyndie Wright. A raunchy Venus weeps and begs as the gorgeous, occasionally petulant Adonis rejects her advances, more interested in hunting than in love. Venus moves with such ease, you hardly see the team of puppeteers holding her arms as she hurls herself down at Adonis’s feet, or curling her legs as she wallows in self pity. The five puppeteers swim around their characters, handing over control of a head and taking up a hand with surgical skill. Marionettes, shadow, rod, Bunraku and other puppets are used to build this ethereal world of miniature beauty – plus the exquisite ugliness of one angry, snuffly boar.
Wit is at the forefront of Doran’s detailed direction: it’s in the playful pat of a horse’s rump, the brief resting of a hare on an audience member’s head, and the moment Nick Lee’s live guitar comes to an abrupt, knowing halt as Adonis stops Venus’s hand from sliding any further up his perfectly muscled leg. Lee’s select melodies heighten these moments of humour and cast light on the tragedy, as Venus veers from floating with ecstasy to dancing with death on Robert Jones’s golden, fringed set – which hides a secret of its own.
Reading from a seat by the side of the stage, Beale holds each phrase with care: now wise, now funny, now sharp. Tear your eyes from the stage for a moment and you might catch him mirroring the puppets by holding a lovestruck hand to his heart. “Good queen,” he says, catching the eye of Venus who looks up from her reluctant lover, “it will not be.” But who among us hasn’t been advised to let go of love, only to double down and be left with nothing but a throbbing heart?