Leontes is the man with the perfect life. Powerful, wealthy and surrounded by a loving family he should be content, but instead he is ill at ease with the world around him. Isolated by a destructive jealousy, he lashes out at those closest to him, losing his wife and son and abandoning his daughter in distant Bohemia.

Sixteen years later, having grown up in a pastoral idyll, Leontes' daughter falls in love with a young visitor, setting in motion a chain of events that could eventually reunite their scattered family.