'The Winter's Tale' resonates at People's Light

Here's irony for you: For its production of Shakespeare's The Winter's Tale, People's Light and Theatre Company imported Scottish director Guy Hollands, and Hollands, in turn, presented the play as a winter festival celebrating community, featuring locally crafted design elements and edible treats.

It's sort of a riff on this script's own sheepshearing feast, at which area farmers and tradesmen celebrate the coming of spring by wearing masks, singing, and performing. And, in many ways, the gimmick works.

Adding to a sense of togetherness are a short pre-curtain show featuring the cast on an outdoor stage lit by tin-can lamps and beside a warming fire; general admission tickets; and postshow pagan revelry, including a burning of the "Witch of Winter" (a wire-and-straw sculpture).

This particular work is Shakespeare's "kitchen sink" play, with two very different halves (a winter tragedy in which jealous King Leontes accuses his faithful wife, Hermione, of adultery, followed by a spring romance between royal offspring) cleaved by his famous - and most famously tragicomic - stage direction, "Exit, pursued by a bear." The Winter's Tale needs all the unity it can get.

But Hollands also indulges in a bit of kitchen-sinking. Philip Witcomb's sets and costumes evoke, simultaneously, a traveling carnival and a Victorian junk shop. Old-timey circus banners flank parts of the newly built thrust stage, while over the proscenium hangs a bough laden with taxidermied trophies, antlers and seasonal greenery.

In the first act, Leontes' castle is constructed of haphazardly nailed two-by-fours, and characters wear the kind of musty men's fur coats and women's mutton-chop sleeves that would suit one of Edward Gorey's decrepit mansions.

Hollands may have imported a bit of the vibe from his home base, Glasgow's Citizens Theatre, which is said to be haunted by a ghost that looks significantly like the later incarnation of wronged Hermione, and which leans toward a mystical reading of the play's later events (which I won't reveal here, just in case).

Peter Pryor's Autolycus, a scoundrel who also functions as a Brecht/Weill/Swordfishtrombones-era Tom Waitsian bandleader of sorts, binds together as many of these disparate elements as he can, his down-and-dirty barking one of the production's signature satisfactions. Christopher Patrick Mullen's half-mad Leontes and Nancy McNulty's damaged Hermione also resonate.

But Hollands' vision, at its core, chooses style over substance. Lucky for him, and for People's Light, he has phenomenal style.

Through March 3 at People's Light and Theatre Company, 39 Conestoga Rd., Malvern. Tickets: $25 to $45. 610-644-3500 or www.PeoplesLight.orgEndText