Director Jennifer Tang on theatre in 2025, gender-swapping and her 'slightly bonkers' Cymbeline

Born in the South East of England to Cantonese parents and permanently fostered by a white British family, director Jennifer Tang is a champion of the underrepresented. And her involvement in the casting of her brand new production of Cymbeline at London's Sam Wanamaker Playhouse has ensured the spectacle is teeming with diversity. In terms of the Shakespearean canon, the play itself has been somewhat underrepresented over the centuries, so perhaps this is a perfect pairing.

More famous for comprising of almost all narrative plot devices known to the early modern theatre than for actually being performed, William Shakespeare's Cymbeline is Britain's national playwright in his final throes.

We're probably too far out from the pandemic to compare how the play's delivery near to Christmas in 1610 came hard on the heels of a plague-related closure, but issues of nationalism certainly plagued James I and VI as it preoccupies our own age. Yet, Jennifer Tang's new production at the gaspingly beautiful Sam Wanamaker Playhouse has little of that to chew on but much to recommend it.

Cymbeline, here, is not a King of Ancient Britain but a Queen. It's nothing new to change the protagonist's gender, indeed one almost expects something that runs contrary to an 'establishment' performance, but the real test is if it hinders the storytelling. Which I have to say it did at the outset and for the very reason that it was guided by concept instead of narrative. The King becomes the Queen, so the original Queen (the almost archetypal evil stepmother) becomes a Duke. The character whom the play is really about despite it being called Cymbeline (much like Henry IV parts one and two are about Prince Hal) is Imogen - Tang chooses the more