Don't let the negative 'review' posted here by another writer put you off. This is a great, insightful production of one of Shakespeare's most difficult plays. It's a so-called "romance", which means it's neither comedy nor tragedy but with elements of both, and it's built on a rather silly-sounding plot involving broken kingdoms, death and exile, a 16-year time jump in the middle, young lovers, and at the very last, miracles and redemption beyond all hope. But that's the sort of thing that became popular on the London stage in the early 1600's, and the protean Shakespeare was always able to adapt to whatever dramatic form came along. Silly or not, the thing is that in the hands of a good team of actors, The Winter's Tale works. And this is a good team. You just have to get used to the fact that this is the actual stage production from the Garrick Theatre in 2015; it's not redone or reworked as a movie, so it doesn't have a number of the audiovisual advantages that a true movie version could or would have. But it doesn't really need them.
About the actors: the headliners of course are Kenneth Branagh himself as King Leontes of Sicilia, and Judi Dench as Paulina, his advisor/scourge/conscience. (Paulina is one of the most unique and interesting parts that Shakespeare ever came up with, and it is she more than anyone else that drives the engine of the plot and its resolution.) Both of these veterans are reliably good, but for me the standouts were Miranda Raison as Queen Hermione, and Jessie Buckley as the long-lost daughter/princess Perdita. They don't so much play their parts as seize them with both hands. They're the most forceful versions of these roles I have seen (and I've seen half a dozen different productions of this play) and they are what make this Winter's Tale stand out for me. Shakespeare was clearly very fond of the stage archetype of the Young Heroine who is thrown by tragic doings not of her making and must overcome great obstacles to find a new place in the world. He gives us a long string of these beautiful youngsters that we, the audience, instantly fall in love with and root for: Rosalind, Viola, Juliet, Ophelia, Hermia and Helena, Marina, Innogen, Cordelia, Miranda -- and Perdita. Perdita, maybe, is the biggest winner of them all because she not only discovers her true identity but gains a prince, two kingdoms, and her long-lost loving parents to boot.
A serious message of this play comes through by its obvious comparisons to Othello: Leontes, like Othello, is consumed with a baseless jealous rage over his wife Hermione, and it's in a sense even worse because it didn't even need an Iago to touch it off. Tragedy ensues: the queen dies (apparently) offstage in childbirth, their son soon sickens and dies too, the baby is lost, Leontes' friendship with King Polixenes of Bohemia is destroyed, and all is plunged into meaningless darkness. That darkness is where Othello ends. But Shakespeare never does the same thing again in the same way. In Winter's Tale, key characters live on, time heals, and it turns out that there is life and reconciliation beyond brokenness and darkness.
