A TALL TALE, A SHIMMERING MAGIC
Of all Shakespeare’s plays this is now the rarest staged, not without reason: some early scenes are co- written with a contemporary John Wilkins, its tale is dependent on intricate interrupting narration by the medieval poet Gower, and the scene ricochets around the ancient Mediterranean kingdoms and cities – Tyre, Antioch, Tarsus, Pentapolis, Ephesus, Mytilene . Our hero escapes murder after discovering in horror a ruler incestuously abusing his daughter ,is shipwrecked, finds a wife, loses her and the newborn Marina in yet another storm, only to find both again years later in a blaze of healing magic and coincidence. It is messy. Moreover,unusually in Shakespeare its hero the Prince of Tyre is an innocent: no tragic flaw, no envy or malice, Pericles is a proper gentleman, trying to do right.
So salute director Tamara Harvey for choosing this as her first outing as the RSC’s new co-director, and making of it something remarkably beautiful. It is dreamlike, moving, long-memorable. She artfully uses, early on, dim-lit tableaux of movement and stillness, veiled dance and half-glimpsed action behind a curtain of ropes (Jonathan Fensom’s design is framed by cordage, and the storms at sea are an elegant tangle of wild movement by Annie-Lunenette Deakin-Foster). All this reinforces the folktale-epic strangeness of the story, lulling and enchanting us. Claire Van Kampen’s score is no small part of that enchantment: when the healer Cerimon (Jacqueline Boatswain) calls for music as she looks into the coffin of Thaisa, the spine tingles.
Against this dreamy storytelling stand the real humans. Alfred Enoch’s Pericles is perfect casting: youtful, natural, steadfast, boyish, alarmed by wickedness and hostility, childlike in his beginnings but deepening into the immense broken grief of his losses, and a hysteria of final relief which brings actual laughter from the audience. Around his story circle bad people and better ones: honest Helicanus and creepy Antiochus, Cleon grateful for his aid but collaborating in murder and lies with his evil wife Dionyza (Miriam o’Brien stepped in with panache on press night). And there’s a scene-stealing Christian Patterson as King Simonides, presiding over a comical setpiece tournament for his daughter Thaisa and, after some top grade teasing of Pericles and audience, handing her over to shabbier shipwrecked Pericles as a bride with Lychorida giggling behind him. For yes, there is human comedy here as well as magic: the fishermen of Pentapolis, the infuriated bawds of the Mytilene brothel, are all a joy.
And beautifully, the narrator is not Gower: here it is, we discover, the lost daughter Marina herself. Rachelle Diedericks tells her father’s tale from before her birth until she becomes in the late scenes a protagonist, kidnapped and enslaved to the brothel where – in some more wonderful scenes – she ruins their business with her steadfast purity.
For all the play’s oddity the playwright’s best tones ring true through Marina: “Born in a tempest when my mother died, the world to me is like a lasting storm..” As she pleads for her life before the pirate kidnappers swing down on yet more ropes, Shakespeare’s voice echoes unmistakeable “I never kill’d a mouse, nor hurt a fly:I trod upon a worm against my will, But I wept for it.” Wonderful.
And wonderful to give her, back as narrator, the epilogue with its blessing of us all, for gathering to hear the old tale : “New joy wait on you!” So it did.
Rsc.org.uk to 21 sept.
Rating 4.
theatreCat 