Pericles
Page 17
5. A 2003 collaboration between the RSC and Cardboard Citizens directed by Adrian Jackson: “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.” With Adna Sabljic as the Bawd.
Each room was different, and offered the possibility of subworlds within this larger world. One of the most shocking spaces was dominated by a single container such as might travel on the back of a lorry—another recent story was the tragedy of some thirty Chinese migrants found suffocated in just such a container. During one of the storm scenes, women in the company became waves throwing themselves against the outside of this container, in a poignant evocation both of the storm and the shocking experiences of people seeking asylum and being met with steely indifference. There is an epic quality to Pericles, and the promenade form lent itself well to this.
6. Swan Theatre 2006–07: Dominic Cooke’s “production played on the very contemporary idea of human trafficking and sex trafficking. The pirates were Somalis. It was a journey round the Horn of Africa and we chose Somalia as it didn’t have any rulers and was very dangerous, as it remains.”
DC: We set our production against a contemporary background of sex trafficking. Antioch was based on Somalia. We chose Somalia as it is a very unstable country, run by feudal warlords, which felt right for the ruthless unpredictability of Antiochus and his court. Then we made a journey north, through North Africa, across the Mediterranean to Greece. Mytilene was like present-day London, a seedy Soho or King’s Cross. The world of the brothel is very detailed in the play. It’s a failing business that needs pepping up and Marina is seen as their solution. The detail of the brothel as a business suited a realistic setting, which is what we gave it.
Pericles is very episodic, which makes it quite unusual within the Shakespeare canon. Does this narrative structure create problems in the theater or lend the play a unique effect?
AN: It certainly lends the play a unique effect. It means you’ve got to direct it, act it, and set it in a certain way. That’s not a problem though: it’s like saying, Are the songs in a musical a problem? Sure—but they’re also the great glory of it, and the episodic nature of Pericles is one of its great glories. We made it into part of the meaning of the play. It is episodic and we matched the production to the style of writing.
AJ: It’s a play about journeys, and our production was a promenade, moving from space to space for each new world; in each vast room of a warehouse complex we were able to install a different environment.
The episodic nature of the play was another reason why it was a good candidate for this radical treatment—it breaks easily down into chunks, which can easily take the insertion of other text, which becomes a kind of commentary on the real text. The important thing of course is to keep the flow of the narrative and the drama. Testimony on its own can be a bit dry, a bit worthy—after all, it’s best delivered clean and unadorned, the fact of its authenticity demands an honorable and unmessy treatment. So we chose some five or so stories to focus on, of which we delivered relevant fragments around each of the episodes of Pericles’ adventures.
DC: A bit of both. It doesn’t have the self-analysis that, for example, Macbeth or Hamlet have. In those plays much of the drama happens in soliloquy, in self-exploration. But in Pericles it’s action, action, action all the way. The meaning is revealed through the choices and actions of the characters rather than through reflection or self-analysis. That’s very particular to this play above other Shakespeare plays and it does make for a very entertaining experience. The travelogue aspect gives variety to the play that’s refreshing and audience-friendly.
Many audiences have found Pericles utterly charming, having a strong capacity to move. Could you perhaps share your views on the nature of the play’s emotional power? How did your audiences react?
AN: They shed a tear and gave a standing ovation for about fifteen minutes. In terms of audience reaction it was one of the most successful productions I have ever done in my life. The response was overwhelming. People were crying and shouting: it was quite extraordinary. The play has that same power to move, to stir emotions in the audience, as The Winter’s Tale. The story is very emotional because it’s about finding that which is lost. Shakespeare uses the same button that he uses in different ways in The Winter’s Tale and Cymbeline. It’s a powerful button: the horror that most parents have at the prospect of losing their children.
I wanted to use the opportunity Shakespeare gave me for ceremony, for music, which heavily underscored the text in my production. I used a friend of mine, Shaun Davey, an Irish composer who writes most emotional music. We told the story and then, when Shakespeare kicks in in the latter parts of the play, the audience were absolutely ready to engage in a full-blown, psychologically realized situation, particularly the reunion between father and daughter.
AJ: Surely the recognition scene near the end of the play is Shakespeare’s best in that genre, and our audiences were as moved as any. Our general audiences, for the full-scale production, were also greatly affected by the extraordinary contemporary stories of flight we told—and our refugee audiences during our first small tour quite simply identified with the characters and their experiences. It’s perhaps worth recounting a story gathered in that research period, during the tour of our mini-Pericles. One night we performed at a club for Latin American elders in Camberwell, called Los Años Dorados (“The Golden Years”), to an audience of perhaps fifteen people. At the end of the show, one woman, the lady who ran the club, was in floods of tears. Gently our conversations started, and of course I asked her why the play had moved her so much. She said: “My mother was born at sea and called Marina.” She then unfolded a remarkable story of three generations of refugeedom, crossing from Spain to Chile and then, in flight from Pinochet, first to Argentina, then to the UK. The entire audience for the two weeks of performances of the mini-Pericles cannot have been more than three hundred people—so what were the chances of this meeting? Of course, the story of Amada Vergara Silva Espinosa became one of the stories we told in the larger production of the play.
7. Adrian Noble 2002, with Ray Fearon as Pericles and Kananu Kirimi as Marina: “We told the story and then, when Shakespeare kicks in in the latter parts of the play, the audience were absolutely ready to engage in a full-blown, psychologically realized situation, particularly the reunion between father and daughter.”
DC: Our production played in promenade and we were very keen to involve the audience physically and emotionally as much as possible. There is something powerfully redemptive about Pericles being brought back to life when he finds his daughter at the end of the play. I think that the notion of a second chance in life is universally attractive and the audience responded to it. A sense of geographical displacement was clear in our production: the father and daughter are meeting on the other side of the world and their journey has taken them thousands of miles away from home. They meet as displaced foreigners in a strange land. There was a sense of the possibility of grace even in the most unlikely places. As with all Shakespeare reunions, the redemption can’t completely compensate for the scars left by the prior separation. Nothing can make up for the suffering of those lost years. This adds to the emotional power of the moment.
It’s a very artificial, demonstrative play in some ways, featuring lots of dumb shows. Is that a part of it that you embraced willingly?
DC: I feel that if you’re producing any of the late plays you have got to simultaneously take them seriously—emotionally, psychologically, politically—but also allow the playful theatricality of the play’s form to emerge. It’s important to embrace this theatrical aspect of the plays. Pen
tapolis was a Greek island in our production and the tournament scene was an Olympic pentathlon. We did it in a very playful, theatrical way. There are some other bravura theatrical moments written into the play, like the storm and the wedding sequence. It would be a shame not to honor them in production.
AJ: The variety of theatrical modes is another of the gifts the play offers a modern director—audiences now are used to many different ways of telling stories, so dumb shows and choric narrative sit easily alongside all the other devices. Our production also made use of video as a shorthand way of dealing with exposition. As for artificiality—well, theater is artificial, so this is no problem. We also played with notions of the “dumb” show—the idea of some people never being allowed to tell their story, the idea of being struck dumb in trauma.
What kind of role is Pericles for an actor to play? What do you think are its major challenges?
AN: It’s a wonderful part but as an actor you have to be quite generous with it, because you have to wait quite a long time before you get your big scene. The play swirls and swirls around you and you have to accept that the dramatic language of the early part of the play is written in a particular way. It’s not written as mature middle Shakespeare whereby every turn of the character is explored through the text, as is the case with Hamlet or Richard of Gloucester, for example. Every turn of Pericles is not explored through the text. It becomes that later, but not early on and you have to accept that. The early parts of the play are not psychological and there’s nothing you can do about that. But they’re fantastically exciting to play if the production around you is cooking. Then you get the most wonderful things to play in the latter part of the play.
AJ: We had two Pericles, young and old. This makes some aspects of the transition easier, and makes it easier to cast and play; to my mind the second Pericles, the old man, is almost Howard Hughes-like, and, short of ridiculous stage beards, a difficult transformation to effect. I suppose the challenge for a younger actor is to find the experience of loss that anybody over a certain age has easily at their grasp. The recognition scene is so beautifully written, so carefully constructed and paced, that I actually think it’s a gift to an actor—though I would not want to play down the challenge of playing out the journey from deep trauma to almost ecstatic bliss; this is a Lear who lives.
DC: It’s a tricky part. There’s not much self-analysis or self-reflection with which to reveal character. Therefore, as an actor you’ve got to fill the gaps, find how each event contributes to the spiritual evolution of the character. It’s an extreme journey but up to the director and actor to join the dots. The extremity is exciting though and we went for it. In the first scene Pericles is politically naive—dangerously so— and he brings about a very risky and dangerous situation as a result of not being as tactical as he could. Later he has a complete breakdown. He’s crippled with grief and unable to function. We went for those extremes at the beginning and the end and worked out how they joined together through the action of the play.
And Marina?
AN: Kananu Kirimi (KK), who played Marina in our production, was sublime. She had a very particular quality. I think because she came from the Isle of Skye she had a strange, very light Scottish accent. There was always a remoteness about her, which is perfect for that role. Marina is this very special child, a rather unusual creature born with a very strong sense of morality. Some children are born with an innate sense of good and bad and she captured that completely. It’s a little bit difficult to cast, to find in an actor if they haven’t got that. Not all actors can play it. You have got to have it for that part. KK had this wonderful gift of an inner stillness, this beautiful voice, and gave a real moral sense to the choices the character made.
AJ: Marina is perhaps more difficult: to bring her back to earth, to avoid her becoming too saintly. Of course the device of her overcoming rape with mere eloquence is difficult in a modern production. The concept of sexual slavery is after all only too familiar now, and we doubt that the hardhearted dealers in flesh we read about would pay too much heed to such a plea. That’s if we take it literally—for most productions it’s presumably about the power of eloquence, the way women in Shakespeare often rise above their given status by means of the power of speech. I preferred to think of it as a species of wish fulfillment on Marina’s part—she rises above the incident by the power of her mind, as one hears tell that the only way to deal with such a horror in reality is to turn off part of consciousness and rise above it. We tried, unsuccessfully I think, to convey this idea by having the scene break down for a moment at this point. The attempted rape took place in a nasty builders’ cabin in the corner of one of the spaces—the audience could either watch it through peepholes cut in the paper covering the windows, or on a projected CCTV version. At the moment when, to my mind, this psychological feat took place, there was a sound, the image froze for a while, and then resumed, as if in some other register. The rape is no one’s business—in a kind of way, it’s irrelevant if she’s raped; what is remarkable is that she survives it and remains strong.
DC: I think Marina is an even harder part to play than Pericles because she is one of those characters that’s in danger of being too good to be true. Her presence in the play denotes innocence and purity—qualities that are hard to act and can easily feel cloying for an audience. Casting that part was hard. We must have seen thirty very strong actresses for it. When Ony Uhiara came in she wasn’t acting: she has an integrity that doesn’t need to be acted or played. It’s just who she is. What’s interesting about Marina is that people see their own potential for goodness in her. So she has to be played to have a quiet neutrality that the other characters can project onto.
How much importance did you attach to the role of magic in the play and how did you realize it onstage in your productions?
AJ: The most literally magical moment is the emergence of Thaisa recovered, after the ministrations of the healer. This was played in a combination of video projected onto the open side of the container, and the emergence of the living actress through this video. For me, magic per se is not interesting—I want to know how a trick is done; I want to understand how something that seems like magic is in fact real. Reality is often magical. The regathering of Pericles’ family at the end of the play was mirrored by events we hear from an Iranian asylum seeker, who thought his scattered family was dead, only to receive a phone call from Australia some six years after he had last seen them.
The goddess Diana is taken to be magical—but in our production we had the only Diana we could have, the princess who had died a decade earlier. She was an ordinary person of course, but the world elevated her, particularly after death, to a magical and deified status. This is how magic is done, by projection; the magic is in our imaginations. We ended our production with an evocation of the sea of flowers that became the shrine of Princess Di. The tongue was near the cheek …
DC: If you deny the presence of magic in the play, you’re in danger of reducing the scale of experience that the play charts in order to fit it into an empirical, materialist, twenty-first-century view of the world. Magic in the play is metaphor for many things, mostly the rejuvenative power of nature and the possibility of healing and transformation. Cerimon was played by a woman: the same actor, Linda Bassett, who played the Bawd. She also played Paulina, who brings Hermione back to life in The Winter’s Tale and is called a “bawd” by Leontes. This created an interesting continuity between both plays. We set the revival of Thaisa in a New Age community: somewhere where pagan magic would be believed and practiced. Cerimon was an elder within that community. We created a world outside mainstream society, a hidden world of unconventional values. When Cerimon brought Thaisa back to life it was powerful and moving in performance. Of course, we were helped by having two exceptionally committed and talented actresses in the roles in Linda Bassett and Kate Fleetwood as Thaisa.
One of the unique things about Pericles within the late plays is its use of Gower as
a Chorus (only The Winter’s Tale does something similar, featuring one speech by the figure of Time). What effect does Gower’s presence have on the experience of the play, and how did you depict him?
AN: There is a kind of framing device in both Cymbeline and The Winter’s Tale. They both start with two gentlemen talking and giving you the story up to that point. This is formalized in Pericles through the character of Gower, but its function is no different. Somebody tells a story and that story is enacted and brought to life. At a stroke, that embraces the episodic nature of Pericles and makes it a virtue. You have to go down that line. The actors and the audience are gathered in by Gower and it becomes an informal, exotic experience. Gower repeats, comes back and forth during the whole piece and ties everything up at the end. He is the glue, he is the narrator, he is the person who is the direct contact between the audience and the characters.
AJ: Gower just became a shared chorus for us. He was not one person, just the voice of the narrative. Sometimes Pericles younger or older spoke his lines, sometimes others. For us the idea of Gower was not important, only the choric function. The idea of an older man speaking to a younger self is powerful too.
The whole play offers any director a huge freedom, and lends itself well to contemporary illustration or reference. For me, the keynote of a production partly performed and heavily informed by refugees and outcasts is the glorious metaphor offered early in the play, as a warning: “The blind mole casts / Copped hills towards heaven, to tell the earth is thronged / By man’s oppression, and the poor worm doth die for’t.”