Pericles

by William Shakespeare

  2002—Levantine splendor

  For Adrian Noble’s production, which started at the Roundhouse and transferred to the Royal Shakespeare Theatre, Peter McKintosh designed an impressive peninsular stage, richly carpeted and bordered by walkways, hung with a myriad oriental lamps and opening into a bulb-shaped inner stage, where the jousting at Pentapolis was played, as well as the brothel scenes and the reunion of Pericles and Marina.

  2003—the holding center

  In the warehouse venue of the production with Cardboard Citizens, the “set” was inventive and even witty. It included large shipping containers, strings of children’s clothes, and industrial washing machines, which churned and spewed during the storm scene. The attempted rape of Marina was filmed with brutal realism and shown on a large screen, while Diana’s temple was a huge picture of Diana, Princess of Wales, complete with a sea of floral tributes. It had the additional advantage, not available in more conventional venues, of a clammy coolness that chilled the audience to the bone.

  2006—Africa

  In Dominic Cooke’s promenade performance at the Swan, the cities of Asia Minor became unequivocally African. The black actors who, for the most part, took minor roles in The Winter’s Tale, took center stage: King Antiochus became an African dictator—a Mugabe or Amin—surrounded by genuinely frightening, trigger-happy soldiers, and the exhausted white-swathed citizens of Tarsus evoked television images of famine. Pentapolis, under the good Simonides, was strikingly contrasted, a world of feasting and laughter; this is the only opportunity for laughter that the play offers (apart from a grim smile in the brothel scenes) and Cooke exploited it to the full: the jousting became a comic pentathlon that included a spoof steeplechase and an inspired parody of Olympic swimming. The curtained inner stage enabled a naturalistic set to be revealed for the Mytilene brothel; in its cramped seediness, Marina appeared truly trapped, fluttering in her white dress like a moth inside a grubby lamp shade.

  Deliberate Doubling

  The episodic nature of this play makes the doubling of roles eminently practical, and most productions have used it to some extent, but, practicality aside, there is an enormous amount to be gained from doubling in such a way as to highlight the mirroring of events and characters that patterns the play. Paul Taylor, regretting the absence of doubling in Adrian Noble’s 2002 production, wrote,

  There have been productions that have highlighted (through doubling and visual echoes) the eerie psychological continuity of a play where the sin of incest, discovered at Antioch, seems to resurface in a minatory coded form at all of the hero’s subsequent ports of call, until the threat is finally confronted and redeemed by reunion with his daughter.70

  1969 was a year of “deliberate doubling”: in Trevor Nunn’s production of The Winter’s Tale, Judi Dench doubled the mother and daughter roles of Hermione and Perdita, while Susan Fleetwood doubled Thaisa and Marina in Pericles. Such doubling is not easy to manage, since doubles have to be brought on at the end of the plays for the final reunions, but much is gained dramatically by these daughters’ literally embodying the virtues of their apparently dead mothers. In the 1969 production, there was further deliberate doubling: Morgan Shepard doubled the incestuous and brutal King Antiochus with Bolt, the whoremaster in the Mytilene brothel, while Brenda Bruce doubled the murderous Queen Dionyza with the Bawd. High and low, tragic and blackly comic, these characters who beset Pericles and Marina were mirrored in the same actors.

  In 1979, in Ron Daniels’ simple emblematic production, a cast of fourteen played thirty-eight roles, so doublings, treblings, and quadruplings were to be found, not all of them significant. Some of the doublings were telling, however, not in their mirroring but in their reversing: Julie Peasgood played first—in black—Antiochus’ incestuous daughter, and then—in white—Pericles’ virtuous, and properly loved, Marina; Suzanne Bertish doubled the destructive Dionyza with the restorative goddess Diana; Heather Canning played the nurse, Lychorida, who brought Marina into the world, and the Bawd in Mytilene who would have destroyed her. The 2003 Warehouse production was played with a cast of twelve and again produced some telling doubling: Leonine and Cerimon were doubled—murderer and healer—and David Mara doubled Cleon and Lysimachus—two flawed rulers; the one damned, the other saved.

  In 1989, Russell Dixon doubled the wily and benevolent King Simonides with a coarsely threatening performance as Bolt, the whoremaster, and Helen Blatch moved from the tranquil healer, Cerimon, restoring Thaisa to life, to a raging Bawd in the brothel, so that the two protectors of Thaisa, her father and her rescuer, became the persecutors of her beleaguered daughter. In 2006, three doublings were exploited: Ony Uhiara, appearing first as pure jailbait in schoolgirl white ankle socks in the role of Antiochus’ silent daughter, returned as a fiercely eloquent, virginal Marina, while Richard Moore doubled a jovial Simonides with a malevolent Pander, and

  Linda Bassett followed up a life-enhancing scene as Cerimon with a devastatingly coldhearted performance as the Bawd. In this production, though, there were further echoes, since the same company played Pericles and The Winter’s Tale: those who saw both plays saw the affecting Kate Fleetwood restored to life both as Thaisa and as Hermione, and saw Linda Bassett as her tender restorer, both as Cerimon and as Paulina.

  The Prince of Tyre

  The character of Pericles is, in some ways, a blank. Each actor makes of the character what he finds there. It is a role that is slow to build, partly because the non-Shakespearean language of the first two acts gives an actor limited scope; it is interesting how often critics quote Pericles’ lines,

  The god of this great vast, rebuke these surges

  Which wash both heaven and hell

  at the beginning of Act 3, as the point at which Shakespeare takes over and the actor comes into his own. His final test is the scene of reunion with his daughter, a scene to rival the end of The Winter’s Tale, or even the reconciliation of Cordelia and Lear. It rarely fails.

  In 1969, “Ian Richardson was a sad, patient prince”: “Richardson, his face the bearded face of a grandee from an El Greco canvas, his voice a silver bugle, makes an imposing figure despite his slight build.”71 Peter McEnery, ten years later, also sent the critics reaching for musical metaphors: “Peter McEnery’s noble voice rings like a trumpet for the young Pericles, tolls like a funeral bell for the bowed heartbroken Pericles of Acts 4 and 5, whose fingernails have grown like vulture’s talons in his self-neglect.”72 In the intimate space of the Other Place, McEnery’s reunion with his daughter produced an extraordinary breathless hush. In 1989, Nigel Terry was an aristocratic, powerful Pericles, convincing in the early scenes as his intelligence, his integrity, and his physical prowess are tested, and moving in the reunion scene with Suzan Sylvester as Marina, who made a “stunning”73 Stratford debut, compellingly convincing in her unaffected virtue.

  4. RST 1969, directed by Terry Hands, with Ian Richardson as Pericles and Susan Fleetwood as Thaisa, Simonides (Derek Smith, background left), Gower (Emrys James, background right): “Richardson, his face the bearded face of a grandee from an El Greco canvas, his voice a silver bugle, makes an imposing figure despite his slight build.”

  In 2002, Ray Fearon was a “strong, virile presence”74 and “so wonderfully warm a man as well as so intensely chivalric a prince, that his grief meant more than usual.”75 So wrote Benedict Nightingale, who admitted, hard-boiled critic though he was, to being moved to tears by Fearon’s father-daughter reunion with Kananu Kirimi. In the 2003 production, the role was split, with Christopher Simpson as the younger Pericles and Kevork Malikyan as the older, giving “a magnificent portrayal of quiet desolation.”76 In 2006, Lucian Msamati, though physically not altogether convincing as the Olympic champion, started as sturdy and stoical and rose to vocal and emotional power. The reunion scenes, first with Ony Uhiara as Marina, and then with Kate Fleetwood as Thaisa, were extraordinarily moving, played in and among the audience.

  THE DIRECTOR’S CUT: INTERVIEWS W
ITH ADRIAN NOBLE, ADRIAN JACKSON, AND DOMINIC COOKE

  Adrian Noble, born in 1950, arrived at the RSC from the Bristol Old Vic, where he had directed several future stars in productions of classic plays. His first production on the main stage of the Royal Shakespeare Theatre in Stratford was an acclaimed 1982 King Lear, with Michael Gambon as the king and Antony Sher as an extraordinarily powerful Fool. Two years later his Henry V sowed the seed for Kenneth Branagh’s film. Among his other major productions during his two decades at the RSC were Hamlet, again with Branagh in the title role, The Plantagenets, based on the Henry VI/Richard III tetralogy, and the two parts of Henry IV, with Robert Stephens as Falstaff. Noble’s 1994 A Midsummer Night’s Dream was made into a film. He was artistic director of the RSC from 1991 to 2003, since when he has worked as a freelance director. His production style is characterized by strong use of colors and objects (such as umbrellas), and fluid scenic structure. He is here discussing his 2002 production, which started at the Roundhouse before moving to the RST in Stratford.

  Adrian Jackson is the founder-director and chief executive of Cardboard Citizens, a theater company he conceived in 1991 in which the performers and many administrative employees are homeless and ex-homeless people, refugees, or asylum seekers. The company has held charitable status since 1994, and tours theater productions, especially interactive Forum Theatre—a technique developed by the late Augusto Boal, the influential Brazilian writer-director, four of whose books Jackson has translated—to many kinds of venues, including hostels, day centers, schools, and theaters. Jackson has also mounted a number of larger-scale productions with the company, including The Beggar’s Opera (with ENO), The Lower Depths (with London Bubble), and Mincemeat. In 2003 he directed a coproduction of Pericles for Cardboard Citizens with the RSC, which he discusses here. In 2006 he returned to Stratford with his company with a boardroom-themed Timon of Athens for the RSC’s Complete Works festival, which was performed at the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust. He is a strong advocate and practitioner of Boal’s Theatre of the Oppressed work, which he has taught in many contexts throughout Europe, as well as in Asia, Africa and Latin America, as well as working on theater projects with other marginalized groups, including Irish Travellers, deaf people, and adults with learning difficulties.

  Dominic Cooke was born in London in 1966, and studied at Warwick University, taking up his first job in television as a runner shortly after graduating. He founded his own theater company, Pan Optic, which he ran for two years before starting work as an assistant director for the RSC, as well as freelance director, in the early 1990s. In 1996 he joined the Royal Court as an assistant director under Stephen Daldry, returning to the RSC in 2003 to direct a production of Cymbeline. Other successes with the company include Macbeth (2004), As You Like It (2005), and promenade productions of The Winter’s Tale and Pericles—which he discusses here—for the RSC’s Complete Works season in 2006. That same year he helmed a production of The Crucible, also for the RSC, for which he won the Olivier Award for Best Director. He has been the artistic director of the Royal Court theater since 2006.

  This question might seem pointless, but what is the play broadly “about” in your view (if, say, Macbeth is “about” murder and its consequences, or Othello is “about” jealousy and deception)? Or can we not answer the question in this way?

  AN: It’s a useful question to try to answer because a lot of people when they approach this play can find that its meaning can slip like sand through their fingers. I think it is about the pursuit of grace. Pericles undertakes a spiritual journey. That journey is embodied by a literal journey around the eastern Mediterranean but it’s also a metaphor for a spiritual journey toward a state of grace.

  AJ: The aspects of Pericles which drew me to make this particular production of the play were related to the main characters’ experiences of loss and separation, coupled with their fairy-tale reconvergence in the final scenes of the play. With my company Cardboard Citizens, which works particularly with homeless people and refugees, I have had much experience making theater for and with displaced people over the past twenty years, and I was interested to test a hypothesis that Pericles would speak very directly to them. To this end, I made a very cut-down storytelling version of the play with five performers, three from Cardboard Citizens, who had had firsthand experience of refugeedom, and two who had worked with the RSC. This version was rapidly rehearsed and then toured for two weeks to places where newly arrived refugees and asylum seekers were gathered. Each night we played to a different cultural group—one night it would be people from the Horn of Africa; the next, people from the Balkans; the next, people from Iraq or Iran, the Turkish Kurds, and so on. The groups tended to be quite ethnically homogeneous, and many of them had little English. It was remarkable how much they were able to follow and engage with the play, and for sure they did connect their own experiences with those of the play’s characters. After the performances each night we would sit down with the people and hear and record their stories reciprocally— sometimes this would be the beginning of a longer relationship.

  Following on from this “mini-Pericles,” we then mounted a full-scale site-specific promenade production of the play, staged as if in a refugee processing center, of the kind much in the news at the time, both in actuality in Sangatte and in proposal form by various European governments, including our own. In this version a number of the testimonies we had recorded were intertwined with the Shakespearean text, in such a way that each text complemented the other.

  DC: I think it’s about the possibility of life after death; that it’s only through an acceptance and an experience of loss that we learn to value life. That’s a journey that Shakespeare explores repeatedly in the late plays. The play has several images of people being brought back to life, both literally as in the case of Thaisa, and metaphorically in the case of Pericles at the end of the play.

  It’s now largely believed that George Wilkins wrote the first two acts of the play, with Shakespeare taking over for the final three. Were you aware of the join, or does the play work as a coherent whole?

  AN: I was certainly conscious of at least two hands in the authorship, for the following reasons: the actors found it much easier to learn certain parts of the text, and those parts of the text had been identified by scholars as being by Shakespeare; and those parts of the text lent themselves to a larger degree of psychological examination than the earlier parts of the text. As to whether that affects the coherence of the play as a whole: no, not in the slightest. That depends on how you direct. I took certain views not just on that play but on the whole of the season in which it was presented. My production of Pericles was part of a whole season I set up at the Roundhouse [alongside productions of The Tempest directed by Michael Boyd and The Winter’s Tale directed by Matthew Warchus]. It’s important to contextualize what I have to say about Pericles within that particular experiment. All of the late plays to some degree tell the story of a spiritual journey and a search for a state of grace. Shakespeare uses very similar dramatic techniques in those last four plays. There are very strong links in particular between Pericles, Cymbeline, and The Winter’s Tale. There are very powerful similarities of dramaturgy between those late plays, and I wanted to expose those and reveal them to the audience during that Roundhouse season.

  AJ: We were very aware of the joint authorship of the play, and this is one of the reasons that we felt fully licensed to interfere with the text—baldly speaking, much of it is clearly by a lesser hand, and one felt no compunction at cutting vast swaths of text and replacing them with interpolated testimony, which spoke more eloquently to our modern audiences. If more text is to be inserted, and if it is to be more than a token presence, the obvious danger is about the overall length of the production—so again, the substandard stuff from the first two acts in particular was a godsend.

  DC: It’s an undeniable fault line. The difference in the quality of the writing is very marked. If you have any knowledge of Shakespear
e, of his persona as a writer, when you get to the storm scene at the beginning of Act 3 the voice is unmistakable. The beauty of the language, a depth of understanding, and a shading that just isn’t present beforehand. The writing up to this point has a functional quality, a flatness. The narrative is strong but it is rendered in a slightly workmanlike style. The writing really lifts off as soon as Shakespeare takes over and I felt that in performance this is where the play takes off.

  What kind of worlds did you create for your production? What was the story you wanted to tell?

  AN: I designed a theater at the Roundhouse with the audience on a rake for 300 out of the 360 degrees. I then countersunk the stage and put carpets down around it; I created a walkway around at the juncture, so there were seats and standing space, divided by a narrow walkway for the performers, thus making a semi-promenade environment. The audience could either sit down or stand up depending on how they felt. I was seeking to create an environment in which the stories of those three plays could be told in an informal, highly atmospheric, almost festival atmosphere. I wanted going to the Roundhouse to feel like the best party you’ve ever been invited to. There would be music and dance and food and singing and festivities from the moment you arrived to the moment you left, and part of that experience was the telling of the story. With Pericles, we were looking to create an experience for the audience that was replicated in space.

  AJ: As I have noted earlier, our setting for the production was very specific. A number of vast, soulless modern warehouse spaces, used previously amongst other things as the setting for the annual vast Crisis At Christmas temporary homeless hostel, became for us a version of a refugee processing center. At the time, the media were full of images and stories from Sangatte, the huge equivalent shelter outside Calais, from which groups of asylum seekers would launch nightly forays into the Channel Tunnel seeking access to the UK. The images of fences bedecked with drying clothes spoke volumes for us—all these clothes were lives. We echoed this in many spaces; there was a room in which we played some of the storm scenes, full of washing machines running at full blast, then opened to let water lap at the audience’s feet; another room contained nothing other than some fifty or so camp beds, with a forlorn Pericles sitting in the middle of them.