#christopher wheeldon

I went to see Christopher Wheeldon’s Winter’s Tale ballet yesterday and it was really good. Highly recommend. One change to Shakespeare’s play made me absolutely inconsolable: the statue that Paulina unveils at the end is of both Hermione and Mamillius. Except only Hermione comes back to life. In Shakespeare, Hermione’s statue is aged up 16 years, accounting for the amount of time that she has been dead. And perhaps it was just a coincidence based on the dancers that night, but Mamillius looked aged up in the statue, too, though only by a few years—taller, but still undeniably a child. His stone form loomed over the entire reunion scene, colouring the joy with a sense of irreparable loss. At the end of the ballet, Hermione and Perdita exit the stage together, but Leontes goes up to Mamillius’ statue and grabs at it, begging him to come back to life too, until Paulina tells him to go join his wife and daughter. The final image is that of Paulina inclining towards the statue: a child who will never grow up, and a consequence of his actions that Leontes will never be able to make right.