Pericles

by William Shakespeare

  From the 1990s, Pericles took on more serious inflections. Simon Usher’s production at Leicester Haymarket in 1990 drew on the topicality of child abuse scandals to turn Antiochus’ daughter into a “pitiable, anorexic victim,” although the Independent reviewer felt this strained the text.47 Joe Banno’s 1998 production for the Washington Theater Company took a more political state-of-the-nation focus, with Antioch as a U.S. military base, Tarsus a hippie commune, and Tyre a rural plantation. The National Theatre’s 1994 production in London (featuring the chameleonic Kathryn Hunter doubling a variety of roles including Antiochus, Cerimon, and the Bawd) was more playful, with “all the grandiosity and verse of the best musical or dance productions” and the Olivier’s revolving stage pressed into judicious service.48 Henry Goodman’s commanding Gower was unanimously praised, while Douglas Hodge offered a moving lament for Thaisa during the storm scene.

  In the new millennium, productions have proliferated in the light of growing investment in the play’s central concerns. 2003 saw three major productions in London alone. Yukio Ninagawa’s Japanese-language version, hosted by the National Theatre, located the play within a framework of war refugees, shuffling onstage and drawing comfort from the story told by a husband-and-wife pair. The production was described by reviewers as heart-wrenching, as “the victims of a fearful disaster enact a needed fable about the continuity of human existence,” emblemized in the reunion of father and daughter.49 Meanwhile, in a Southwark warehouse, Cardboard Citizens (a professional company who work with refugees and homeless people) turned its audience into itinerant wanderers like Pericles. Audience members were given tags and subjected to immigration questionnaires before being escorted from one loading bay to another as Pericles called at different ports. Here, the play itself remained fragmented in keeping with the audience/refugee experience, the wandering audience itself becoming the production’s unifying feature—co-produced with the RSC, it is discussed in more detail below with the RSC productions and by director Adrian Jackson in “The Director’s Cut.”

  Neil Bartlett’s version at the Lyric Hammersmith recast Pericles’ tribulations as a psychodrama set in an implied hospital ward, with Pericles attempting to atone for leaving the daughter of Antiochus to her fate. This was echoed in Andrew Hilton’s 2005 production at Bristol’s Tobacco Factory, where Antiochus’ daughter “hands [Pericles] the written riddle with such eloquent, dignified pleading in her eyes, albeit offset by a royal reserve, that you wonder why the absconding hero thinks only of himself.”50 Also in 2005, Kathryn Hunter directed the play for Shakespeare’s Globe. Pericles was here played by two actors, with the older Corin Redgrave watching Robert Luckay as his younger self abandoning his daughter and crying “I could have saved her!” Gower (Patrice Naiambana) was an African storyteller who doubled as Cerimon to bring Thaisa back to life in a tribal ritual. The production employed a group of aerialists, swinging from the eaves of the theater, who illustrated the action throughout, turning “the tournament at Pentapolis into a spectacular modern Olympics as they hang upside down from ropes or dangle dangerously from circus hoops.”51

  As the play grows in familiarity and critical esteem, so too is it being staged more frequently around the world. Although it was neglected for many years, the spiritual, political, and sociological questions raised by the play have rendered it increasingly relevant to a globalized and dislocated society, as evidenced by the growing number of productions in recent years. Paradoxically, it is this very marginality of Pericles that has brought it back to the center of the performed canon.

  AT THE RSC

  Pericles was not included in the 1623 First Folio of Shakespeare’s plays, probably because Heminges and Condell, who put the Folio together, knew that it was not the work of Shakespeare alone. Modern word analysis techniques have shown that the first nine scenes (the first two acts) are not by Shakespeare, but that the rest of the play is. The author of the early scenes is thought to be George Wilkins, a minor playwright, one of whose plays was performed by Shakespeare’s company, the King’s Men, in 1608. The first two acts are weak, the action jerkily episodic, and the language often simplistic and banal. In addition, the 1609 Quarto edition of the play is full of errors and omissions, so that performance texts depend on reconstructions by modern editors and vary widely. A director taking on the play has not only to find an approach but to choose a text. With all these disadvantages, it is one of Shakespeare’s least performed plays, but the “mouldy tale,” as Ben Jonson called it, the rambling and at times ill-written chronicle of Pericles’ travels and sufferings that appears, on the page, strange and intractable, has, like Cymbeline (written two years later), a way of working magically on the stage.

  The play seems to relate rather particularly to a turning point in Shakespeare’s own life at the time: during 1607–8, when he must have been working on the play (it was first performed in 1608), his elder daughter, Susanna, married and gave birth to a daughter; three years later, Shakespeare would return to live in Stratford, to be reunited with the wife and daughters from whom he had been separated during his working life in London. The themes of the play, death and birth, loss and restoration—in particular the reunion of father and daughter—seem to have obsessed him: they are worked over again in the other late plays, The Winter’s Tale and Cymbeline (written between 1609 and 1611). In fact, on all five occasions that Pericles has been produced at Stratford since 1961 it has been paired with one of these other, more popular, plays: with The Winter’s Tale in 1969, 2002, and 2006, and with Cymbeline in 1979 and 1989. One might think that it was felt to lack validity on its own.

  Telling the Tale

  1969, 1979, 1989—Gower’s invention

  When Terry Hands directed the play at the RST in 1969, it had not been seen at Stratford for eleven years. Richard Johnson had played Pericles in 1958 and Paul Scofield in 1947; before that, a production in 1900 is the only one on record. Hands gave cohesion and drive to the play by making the narrator, Gower, the linchpin of his production: the play was Gower’s tale and the characters and events were his invention and under his control. Emrys James, as a Welsh, bardic Gower, remained onstage throughout, watching, managing, and explaining. The critic of the Financial Times grumbled,

  Terry Hands has gone all out for the symbolism, so much so that there is little left of the fairytale quality of the play as it appears on the stage. From beginning to end he has given us a ritual, performed not by men and women but by puppets conjured up from Gower’s brain as he tells the story.52

  Other critics embraced the approach:

  All this serves to hold naturalism at bay, and keep the storytelling flexible and relaxed. Flexibility is one of the play’s merits. The play itself matches improbable incidents with extreme changes between tragic passions, magic and low comedy, and Mr. Hands is equal to them all.53

  Hands’ inspiration in celebrating, rather than attempting to disguise, the folktale aspects of the play was reflected in two subsequent productions.

  In 1979, Ron Daniels, in his first Shakespeare production for the RSC, again placed Gower’s narrative at the center of the play. He directed a bare-bones, lucid, gently allegorical version at the Other Place, a theater more accustomed to the new and experimental. Exploiting the starkness of the venue, he placed the action on a bare wooden circle and employed a minimum of emblematic props, summoned by Griffith Jones as a sonorous and commanding Gower. Embracing the simplicities of the play’s moral framework, he costumed the actors symbolically—white for the good, black for the bad. Disguising the weakness of the first two acts, he arrived, as critic Michael Billington commented, at “an extraordinarily tactful”54 solution, filling out the deficiencies in the verse of the early scenes with percussive music (composed by Stephen Oliver), which gradually gave way as Shakespeare’s verse took over with its own vocal music. Like the best productions of Cymbeline, it had “the spellbinding charm of a Shakespearean fairytale.”55

  Peter Holland wrote of David Thacker’
s 1989 production at the Swan Theatre, “What the production exuded through every pore was sheer delight in the possibilities of telling a story in the theater.”56 Again the production depended on the strong presence of Gower to knit the story together, particularly in the shaky first two acts, and to guide the audience on its tour of Greece and Asia Minor:

  3. The Other Place 1979, directed by Ron Daniels: embracing the simplicities of the play’s moral framework, he costumed the actors symbolically-white for the good, black for the bad. With Julie Peasgood as Marina and Peter Clough as Lysimachus.

  [Rudolph] Walker’s Gower was a genial author-narrator, reading from a book, watching the action from a comfortable armchair, a figure closer perhaps to the traditions of television storytelling, as if the stage of the Swan were no different from the set for BBC’s Jackanory and the audience an avid group of children, eager to know what happened next.57

  Thacker exploited the theatrical potential of the Swan Theatre, making use of the galleries to present emblematic tableaux and to frame Nigel Terry’s Pericles, at each stage of his journey, at the top of the central stairs that ran from stage to gallery. He filled the stage with color and movement for the pentathlon at Simonides’ court and created a delicate stage magic in the scene where Cerimon restored Thaisa to life. By recasting the Lord Cerimon as a female healer-priestess, surrounded by female attendants, he gave the scene a hushed gentleness that contrasted beautifully with the noise and movement of the preceding storm scene and carried echoes of Paulina’s restoration of Hermione at the end of The Winter’s Tale.

  2002—a spectacular masque

  This production started life, together with the other late plays, The Winter’s Tale and The Tempest, in London’s Roundhouse, moving to the RST a month later. The Roundhouse is a huge, echoing venue which is not easy to fill. Adrian Noble, who directed the trio, had just stepped down as artistic director of the RSC, following a troubled time in which he had made some unpopular decisions, including giving up the Barbican Theatre as the RSC’s London home. It was crucial that these plays should succeed in this venue, and Pericles, in a boldly reconstructed text, was certainly received with rapture by audiences. The critics, however, were more divided. Benedict Nightingale shared the rapture:

  Noble’s revival has the pace and intensity, the sense of wonder and, yes, the magic to bounce us into believing pretty much anything … It is full of exotic moments … yet the décor never distracts or overwhelms.58

  Other critics differed, feeling that the play was not allowed to speak for itself or weave its own magic, drawing attention to Noble’s recent work directing a musical: Michael Billington suggested “Noble treats this wonderful neglected play as if it were a spectacular masque or Jacobean musical,”59 while Paul Taylor of the Independent called it “a Pericles that keeps threatening to turn into a feel-good family musical.”60

  Taylor acknowledged that the production had “a powerfully involving atmosphere, a genuine sense of wonder and a strongly bonded company”61 but agreed with Billington that “the language was buried under effects.”62 These effects were powerfully theatrical: in the first scene, as Pericles entered Antioch to woo Antiochus’ daughter, severed heads dropped on him from above—the unsuccessful wooers who had preceded him; in Ephesus, the goddess Diana plunged from the heavens and the reunited family was showered from above with rose petals.

  There was also continuous background music, composed by Shaun Davey: turbaned musicians, playing instruments that included Greek clarinet and bouzouki, were onstage throughout, and the storm scene was accompanied by furious drumming. Some found the score over-sentimental and “Lloyd-Webberish,”63 but audiences, for the most part, appeared to differ.

  2003—real-life stories

  In a disused London warehouse, Adrian Jackson directed a production in collaboration with Cardboard Citizens, a theater company formed by homeless people. The production took the play’s themes of wandering and loss, and linked them very directly to the experience of twenty-first-century asylum seekers. For the audience, the theatrical experience was made physically and emotionally uncomfortable: the venue was set up as a refugee holding station, and audience members were “processed” on arrival—issued with numbers and instructions on how to behave. They were then taken into an “Education Room,” where they listened to the personal testimonies of asylum seekers before taking part in a promenade performance of the play, which involved trekking considerable distances around the chilly, echoing warehouse. Critics found it a difficult evening and complained not only of the physical discomfort but of the serious audibility problems caused by the combination of an echoing acoustic and largely inexperienced actors, but they were all won over to some extent by the emotional intensity of the performance. Sam Marlowe spoke for many: “This is an imperfect evening, and at times a crude and infuriating one. But it has the buzz of a true theatrical event—and its passion cannot be doubted.”64

  Some of the personal testimonies were poignantly apposite: an Indonesian woman described how the boat that was carrying her and four hundred others capsized and three of the pregnant women on board went into labor; in the ensuing chaos, as she clung to the upturned boat, she saw a dead woman float by with her baby floating beside her, still attached by its umbilical cord. Kate Bassett commented that “Jackson never quite captures the transcendent poignancy of those scenes where broken lives seem suddenly mercifully blessed,”65 but perhaps that was Jackson’s intention. He intercut the family’s final reunion with a filmed scene in which a therapist talked to a silent refugee, too traumatized to speak—no easy resolution here. The late romances make sense of grief and dislocation by offering the magical possibility of restoration, and we weep tears of relief, but set against the unreconciled losses of real-life narratives they may test our credulity too far.

  2006—as though it was new

  When Dominic Cooke directed Pericles and The Winter’s Tale with the same company, at the Swan for the Complete Works season in late 2006, he was about to take over as artistic director at the Royal Court. Paul Taylor, reviewing the plays in the Independent, reminded us that “the rubric of The Royal Court is to direct new plays as though they were classics and classic plays as though they were new.”66 Cooke fulfilled this aim in his direction of both the plays, which emerged new-minted, contemporary, and engrossing. They were performed in a transformed Swan: all the seats had been taken out of the stalls and the theater turned into “a ramshackle adventure playground.”67 Mike Britton designed a wide, curving ramp reaching from ground to Gallery One level, with elevated walkways and a raised, enclosed acting area for intimate scenes. While seats were still available in the galleries, the rest of the audience stood in the stalls area, where they were closely involved in the action. In fact, among the contemporary costumes, there was no clear distinction between cast and audience. The promenaders were corralled at gunpoint in the military dictatorship of Antioch; they danced and feasted in Pentapolis and sat on the floor and wept at the reunion of Pericles and Marina. They, and the rest of the audience, were guided and reassured by Joseph Mydell as a commanding but playful Gower, moving among the audience, driving the action along.

  The Mediterranean World

  One might think that one of the challenges for director and designer would be to let the audience know where they are in a play that makes a two-decade tour of the Mediterranean, taking in Antioch, Tyre and Tarsus, Pentapolis, Mytilene, and Ephesus, but most, in fact, establish an overall mood and atmosphere, allowing events and places to flow freely one to another.

  1969—“a country where a marvel is an acceptable commonplace”68

  David Nathan so described the world that Terry Hands, Timothy O’Brien (designer), and Guy Wolfenden (composer) created in the first RSC production. In Hands’ version, the individual cities were not differentiated, and the audience located itself through Gower’s narration and direction. The action took place on a bare, white-walled stage, onto which Gower summoned his charact
ers, who moved with classical economy and in formal groupings. Above the stage hung a hollow gold dodecahedron, which evoked Platonic philosophy, a belief in order and form, underpinning the play’s nonCristian world.

  1979—an allegorical world

  At the Other Place, Ron Daniels too let the narrative speak for itself. At Gower’s command, skulls on poles took us to Antioch; the tournament at Pentapolis was suggested by the clashing of staves; a pole and a rope was enough for a storm: “A slanting rope is stretched across the stage and as the characters cling precariously to it in lightning flashes the sense of being in tempest is instantly conveyed.”69 While no attempt was made at geographical realism, the black and white costumes told the audience the moral worth of each city: they knew that Pentapolis, under white-clad “good Simonides” was a genuine safe haven, but feared for the safety of baby Marina, left in the care of black-turbaned Queen Dionyza.

  1989—the Grand Tour

  For David Thacker’s production at the Swan, Fran Thompson took the audience into a loosely eighteenth-century world (though the tourney at Pentapolis for the hand of Thaisa was medieval): Nigel Terry, as Pericles, wore a tattered frock coat, like a gentleman on the Grand Tour who has run into difficulties on his travels, and the scenes in the brothel in Mytilene were vivid evocations of Hogarth cartoons. Again the audience knew where it was by relying on Gower’s lucid narrative.