Reading Shakespeare is infinitely different from seeing it in the flesh. Consider this passage from The Winter’s Tale, currently playing at The Project Arts Centre in Temple Bar.

                          Is whispering nothing?
Is leaning cheek to cheek? is meeting noses?
Kissing with inside lip? stopping the career
Of laughing with a sigh (a note infallible
Of breaking honesty)? horsing foot on foot?
Skulking in corners? wishing clocks more swift?
Read in a silent room, it becomes a little poem of rising intensity. Read out of context, as we are doing here, and I have a feeling Shakespeare wouldn’t mind it being so, it might be read as a happy definition of the weight of love, a way of saying “this has value”. Its way of extending a thought with a parenthesis and then going back to five-beat questions sets up a tingle in the ear in the otherwise becalmed reader.
     

Naturally, when Leontes says it in this production, it is a snarl of jealousy at his wife’s alleged infatuation with Polixenes. And with him it is definite assertion that life has no value at all. It is hoarsely barked. The magical fall of the foot is lost. But even if we might regret that, what cannot be lost is Leontes’ character, brilliantly and tirelessly acted by Chris JJ Heaney. What makes him unusual is that these are beautiful images, as Leontes must in some way know. He is with Macbeth as one of the great imaginers in Shakespeare. And in Heaney’s portrayal this makes him even more batty with rage and envy.
     

The production is by CSI, who are not Crime Scene Investigation, though there are rich pickings for such a possibility, but Classic Stage Ireland. It is efficiently directed by Andy Hinds. The best piece of directorial perversion comes when it is comically suggested that in the end Paulina marries the wrong man in getting hitched to Camillo. With Paulina played like a battle-axe by Lisa Thurman, and Camillo modestly played by Neil Hogan, it’s a good joke. The suspicion that it might be the Miami version of The Winter’s Tale was reinforced at the beginning with the set of three dim blue overhead lamps and some battered chairs and a table that came out of an interview room. But the actors and actresses are dinner jacketed and evening dressed. Always a wise move, because although suits weren’t around in Shakespeare’s time, they do cross the ages, and create the right mood of indifference to period frills. Look at the acting, is their point.
     

It’s a massive cast for a small theatre, and they all do well. Shakespeare would give good lines to the taxi-man. What’s rarer is for the actors to take the hint. But they do here. The exception to the suit rule is Autolycus (Andy Blaikie), the rogue, who wears modern clothes and is cheaply played with an Australian accent: this will appeal only to those who think “antipodean” a long, hard, funny word. Andy Blaikie may actually be an Australian but this does not excuse it.
     

Shakespeare’s psychological depth gets talked about a lot, in blindness to the fact that Shakespeare is primarily a great poet and thinker. Hamlet, for example, doesn’t just “feel sad”; he thinks too well. But in Leontes, Shakespeare did powerfully link sexual jealousy and nihilistic abandon, and Heaney, in a commanding performance, thoroughly incarnates the role.