Cymbeline is one of the least performed of Shakespeare’s plays, clogged up with a dog’s breakfast of a plot elucidated through some of the most opaque verse to be found in his works. It does not always seem to know whether it wants to be near-tragedy or a full-fledged farce, and at times it feels like Shakespeare, anticipating the odious and fraudulent William S. Borroughs, cut up his previous plays into strips and tossed them into the air, creating a new work out of whatever fell together: a piece of Richard III here and a line of Hamlet there put into the shape of Othello, with a good deal of Romeo and Juliet spread over the whole. In the hands of the six-man Fiasco Theater, performing at Manhattan’s Barrow Street Theater under the direction of Noah Brody and Ben Steinfeld, it is not only one of the best Shakespeare performances in recent memory but also—happy surprise—one of the better musical performances, too.
To begin to summarize the plot is to begin to appreciate its absurdity: The British king, Cymbeline (Andy Grotelueschen), discovers that his daughter and only child, Imogen (Jessie Austrian), has secretly married a poor but noble man, Posthumus (Noah Brody), although he had intended to marry her to her stepbrother, Cloten (Grotelueschen again), his queen’s son by a prior marriage. Posthumus is exiled and travels to Rome, where Caesar Augustus just happens at that very moment to be considering a clampdown on his British