Shakespeare's plays are standardly classified as Tragedy, Comedy or History, for the convenience mainly of students and editors of his Collected Works. But like that other late work The Tempest, The Winter's Tale transcends classification into any of the three. It is not even clear that the label "tragi-comedy" serves, although this hybrid fits The Winter's Tale better than The Tempest.
    Another respect in which the two plays are alike is that they are both exceedingly difficult to stage, though for different reasons. The Tempest requires special effects: marine storms and island wizardries, creatures flying and monsters crawling in the mire. The Winter's Tale needs a storm too, and a bear, neither too hard to provide; its real problem lies in its being structurally broken-backed, its two halves lying sixteen years apart, with the second half's psychological cruces being so great that some of them have to occur off-stage – as when a lost princess's true identity is revealed, a king is reconciled to his son, the resurrection of a queen believed dead for sixteen years is explained. 
    The creaking and groaning of the play's improbabilities in its second half are, unless particularly well handled, apt to spoil the powerful effect of the first half (for the textually minded: the midpoint of the play occurs at the end of Act III Scene 2). The first half is an excoriating drama of the wreckage that jealousy makes of life and happiness, an old theme for Shakespeare but revisited in this mature work with freshness and great conviction. Under the wonderfully imaginative direction of Nicholas Hytner, the National Theatre has given the play a brilliant outing, bringing its human tragedy alive, and solving the problems of its second half with ingenuity, wit and panache. 
    Leontes, King of Sicily, believes that his wife Hermione has betrayed him with his oldest and dearest friend, Polixenes King of Bohemia. The suspicion is sewn by his own observations, not by the machinations of a Iago. (Indeed all the royal servants in "The Winter's Tale" are virtuous and honest, though impotent in the face of their absolute masters.) Because it is based on what he takes to be the evidence of his own senses, Leontes' belief in his wife's infidelity is unshakeable – at least, by mortal suasion. It takes a god – Apollo, no less, speaking through his oracle at Delphi – to clear the queen's name and unbind Leontes' eyes. 
    By then it is too late. His little son has died, afflicted by the plight of his accused mother and his separation from her. The infant girl whom Leontes believed to be the illegitimate progeny of his erstwhile friend has, on his instructions, been left to die in a savage place. And then his wife also – as he thinks – succumbs to heartbreak, and is buried. He is left to mourn them all, and with them his folly.
    To this point the grievous workings of jealousy in a mighty and unconstrainable person, by its violence extinguishing the people and affections closest to it, make high drama. Alex Jennings is compelling as the tormented Leontes. He vivifies the process of suspicion catching alight and then bursting into conflagration, his anger and agony vying with each other as he meditates the destruction of Polixenes, his wife, and the baby he thinks is theirs. His Leontes is a man of violent emotion, the unleashing of which makes the whole state tremble. Othello was a general, whose jealousy is a domestic tragedy. In The Winter's Tale the green-eyed demon possess a king, and jealousy becomes a threat to the order of things. It is vented on a queen of transparent virtue – Hermione is gracefully and sensitively played by Claire Skinner – whose suffering makes the destructiveness of jealousy an object lesson.
    With the exception of Autolycus, the pick-pocketing con artist (more about him later), Leontes is the play's only villain, and then only for the period of his jealous rage. But he thereby provides a stark contrast to the tenderness and truth of the lesser personages, especially Paulina, her gentle husband Antigonus who takes the rejected princess to meet her fate on (famously) the Bohemian coastline, and the good servant Camillo, who has to flee Sicilia in order to save Polixenes from murder. There are many good courtiers in Shakespeare – Gloucester in Lear, Horatio in Hamlet – but The Winter's Tale offers an unusually rich portrait of civilised people doing their best in the face of psychological disaster. Hytner's cast paint it to perfection.
    In a stroke of genius Hytner transmutes Autolycus into Ali G, hilariously played by Phil Daniels, whose rock-and-roll endeavours on the electric guitar are extremely convincing. At one point in the big party scene – usually an embarrassment in stagings of The Winter's Tale, but triumphantly turned to account by Hytner – Autolycus sings a pastiche of the most famous lines in Shakespeare's plays, a gesture itself ironic to what is drearily called "postmodern ironising." It works amusingly well. Hytner turns Perdita's country party into the Glastonbury Festival, complete with hippies doing tai chi surrounded by small dancing children and accompanied by acoustic guitars and big spliffs of marijuana. Some are irritated by these mishandlings – as they would see it – of Shakespeare; but were Shakespeare alive today he would without doubt salute Hytner's brilliant solution to the play's serious second-half problems, a solution which succeeds in turning defects into riveting theatre.
    It matters that Sicilia's lost princess, Perdita, and Polixenes' son Florizel should be convincingly played. They are bounden subjects to the majesty of young love, ready to give up everything to its service, and delighted with themselves and the world – until King Polixenes in disguise discovers why his son has been so absent from court, and in a rage denounces him for thinking to marry so far beneath himself. In this production Hytner has found the ideal pair of actors for the cameo. Melanie Clark Pullen's Perdita is petite, gorgeous, lively, and somehow able to convey the ambiguous grace and freedom of being royalty in homespun. In Daniel Robert's Florizel Hytner has found a dead ringer for Prince William, at least from the back, who maturely plays an immature but proud and promising prince. They are ably supported by a charming and utterly persuasive Old Shepherd played by John Normington.
    To praise for the strong cast and brilliant direction must be superadded Ashley Martin-Davis's outstanding design, and the highly professional live music which transforms the second half of the play into an enjoyable romp. Almost nothing can help the closing scenes, with their rapidly proliferating improbabilities and defects, but the unfailing talents of the whole cast make it not just watchable but moving.
    Hytner's The Winter's Tale is, in sum, a brilliant success and a great evening of theatre.
AC Grayling