I admit to having read most of Shakespeare’s plays over my lifetime: some of them more than once, and a few of them often.
But Pericles, never.
Never, that is, until a few days before coming to see the current production at the Shakespeare Festival on July 25th; and, I also admit, the reading wasn’t an easy task.
The play is episodic in nature, lacking a single narrative drive, and includes a great many settings and locations around the Mediterranean Sea. Furthermore, it is generally asserted that Shakespeare had a collaborator for the play, another contemporary dramatist named George Wilkins, who is supposedly responsible for at least the first two acts, and thus the seasoned reader may encounter stylistic or tonal inconsistencies.
The seasoned listener, I discovered on the evening of July 25th, may discover them too.
Bold then, I say, is the company which takes up Pericles in its season. It is seldom performed.
Bolder still, the company which decides to stage it as it would have been done in Shakespeare’s day, the cast learning their lines ahead of time, but coming together to rehearse for only a few days, without a director, staging the play themselves and opening in less than a week.
So may I say, overall, about this production that what could have been one heckuva mess is really a fine lot of entertainment, a grand adventure story on storm-tossed seas, with shipwrecks, pirates, brothels, loves lost and reunited, all led nobly by Christopher Patrick Mullen as Pericles and accompanied by a sterling cast of 14 other actors in named roles (with some double casting) and 9 additional ones in the chorus.
One must be willing to suspend all sense of disbelief on watching this play, more than any other in the canon save perhaps A Midsummer Night’s Dream, for this is a story filled with elements of the surreal, the ultra-theatrical, and so I emphasize it is especially daring to stage this particular play without the guidance of a director to keep a steady hand at the helm.
All credit is due to the actors for keeping themselves grounded (and costumed and staged) in this fantastical tale, which heightens in narrative quality and language throughout, probably due to the fact that the latter portion of the play is what has been written by William Shakespeare. The cast effectively brings together the many disparate parts of this story as a coherent whole.
This was a difficult play to review because there was so much to absorb. I saw it the last night of previews. I know I was seeing some spontaneity and a lot of adrenaline. It’s a brave undertaking, and I offer my heartiest congratulations to the Festival and the cast of Pericles for a mighty undertaking and a job really well done. You should see this mysterious fairy tale and learn a lot about Shakespeare you won’t get a chance to see anywhere else, I venture to say.
Be bold with PSF!