If only he had been around 400 years earlier, Shakespeare’s choice to play Pericles might have been Harrison Ford. It’s a romantic tale of adventure, jousting, pirates and shipwrecks, of foiled murder plots and incest, of rescue from a brothel and a temple, of a daughter lost and found, and a wife who rises from the dead.
Phew! The plays of his late period have a lighter touch than the tragedies that went before, but when it comes to happy endings, Pericles puts the puts the icing and the silver balls and the fairy on the cake.
Or so it should. The play has something to say about good and bad kings, but it’s largely a crowd-pleasing entertainment of no great depth. All it needs is a sense of the exotic, of magic and excitement. Unfortunately, this production has too little of any of them.
It is admittedly a difficult play to stage, with a multitude of characters, many appearing briefly, and scenes set "dispersedly in various countries". It is asking a lot to differentiate between those in Antioch, Tyre, Tharsus, Pentapolis, Ephesus and Mytilene, but using the same bystanders for each does not help. Nor does allowing some incidents to overlap, such as having Pericles present on stage while, in some other land, the wife he believes is dead is being resuscitated beside him.
The main difficulty however lies in some dreadful choreography that has the ensemble frequently assuming exaggerated poses like some 19th century tableau vivant or waving their limbs as if rehearsing for Tai Chi Goes Wrong. It was at best a distraction and several performers looked decidedly embarrassed as they flapped a dutiful flipper; at worst it was a failure of director Tamara Harvey to find something better for them to do. The proper dances, when they came, were pretty ropey too.
Fortunately, there were many fine performances by members of a young cast, most of them new to the RSC, and headed by Alfred Enoch as Pericles. He remains for the most part a rather anodyne goodie, but his talent bursts through in the last act as slowly his inert figure is energised by recognition of his long-lost daughter Marina and then wife Thaisa, and erupts in an explosion of joy that transcends one’s incredulity over something impossibly miraculous.
Christian Patterson earlier picks up the momentum as Thaisa’s father Simonides, the sort of teasing, fun-loving dad everyone should have, Philip Bird is the model, moral statesman Helicanus and Feliz Hayes his villainous, incestuous opposite, Antiochus. Others worthy of special mention include Jacqueline Boatswain as the Bawd and Miles Barrow as her procurer, Boult, both like many others playing more than one role.
Rachelle Diedericks is a sympathetic Marina, subtly coaching her would-be customers at the brothel to mend their ways, but she seemed miscast in doubling as the narrator Gower, which would better suit someone, probably male, with a more powerful voice.
The set looked promising, with multiple ropes strung over the stage and lamps hanging from overhead gantries. They made the interior of the Swan theatre look much like a ship and seemed to indicate derring-do action to come. Alas, it derring-didn’t and the finale rather fizzled out with a solitary lamp lowered to light the three remaining actors off the stage.
I love this play, despite its dramatic flimsiness, and what academics claim is an inferior first half written by another hand. It is not performed as often as it might be, so this is still a production worth seeing. If you go, I suggest reading a synopsis first.
The show travels to the Chicago Shakespeare Theatre from 20 October after its run at Stratford.