Cymbeline, Barbican, review - Telegraph For his production of Cymbeline he finds echoes in the Japanese classic The Tale of Genji and in last year's catastrophic earthquake in Japan. The first inspires his exquisite sets. The second provides the occasion for Ninagawa's single change to Shakespeare's text. A lone pine tree survived the March 2011 earthquake. In Shakespeare's play the emblematic tree is a cedar. Ninegawa makes the minor substitution, which resonates in the line of the great reconciliation scene between the heroine, Imogen, and her love, Posthumous: "Hang there like fruit, my soul, till the tree die." For a British audience, the great absence in Ninagawa's Shakespeare is language. Surtitles strive, distractingly, to make up the deficiency, but a Japanese-language production must stand or fall on spectacle and strength of performance. Ninagawa's sets, costumes and special effects are ravishing, and his lead actors are powerful, particularly Hiroshi Abe as Posthumus and Yosuke Kubozuka as his betrayer, Iachimo. But Ninagawa's production feels most assured when comedy rather than tragedy is the prevailing mode. Keita Oishi as the servant, Pisanio, and Masanobu Katsumura as Imogen's boorish alternative suitor, Cloton, have a dazzling comic energy and precision that seems muted elsewhere in this production. It is hard to banish the subversive wish that Ninegawa had been just a little less respectful of Shakespeare's problem play.