SOURCE: Shore, Robert. “Morally Magnetic.” Times Literary Supplement, no. 5129 (20 July 2001): 21.

In the following review of Mike Alfreds's stylized Cymbeline at the Globe in 2001, Shore praises the production's minimal cast and privileging of comic and ironic elements. Acknowledging some weaknesses in the play's final scene, the critic nevertheless deems this “a fine, bold staging” of one of Shakespeare's most difficult plays to successfully realize.

Performances at the open-air Globe set in high relief those lines in which the Bard eyes the heavens. On the opening night of Cymbeline, for instance, Imogen's question “Hath Britain all the sun that shines?”, delivered as she contemplates exile overseas, drew rueful laughter from a sodden audience. Fittingly, the play dates from the period around 1609, when Shakespeare himself was preparing for a relocation of operations indoors, to the theatre at Blackfriars.

With its large cast, extravagant plotting and swift scene shifts between the British...