Pericles may
be able to claim the title of most universally beloved Shakespearean b-side.
While the play is comparatively less known and staged, not since Ben
Jonson do you hear many Shakespeare-heads denouncing the play or its
performance. Jonson called it a "mouldy tale," as he wished for a
more sophisticated public, better able to appreciate his urbane, insider
city-comedies. Whatever his gripes, Pericles has certainly had a
much more robust dramatic life than Jonson's inscrutable The New Inn, or many
other early modern items forgotten to most playgoers. Pericles seems
to always get "re-discovered" despite no one ever bearing it that
much ill-will in the first place.
The production onstage at Chicago Shakespeare Theater, a transplant from the
Royal Shakespeare Company, makes the strongest possible case for the play as
tearjerker. This Pericles, directed by RSC co-Artistic Director Tamara
Harvey, excels at spinning the play's yarn with a deft and sensitive hand.
This light touch serves the production (almost) all the way through, and makes
the picaresque, episodic nature of the play (which is really more eventful than
actually complex) perfectly charming to follow. To quote from an earlier
Shakespeare title, the sheer number of times this show wrings from you
"tears that sacred pity hath engendered" is pretty damn impressive.
The play begins with a narrator (Rachelle Diedericks) announcing she is giving
us the theatrical equivalent of an antacid. The story, she says:
"...hath been sung at festivals,
On ember eves and holy days,
And lords and ladies in their lives
Have read it for restoratives."
The plot being introduced here is a wild, seafaring voyage, which prominently
follows Pericles' adventures as he seeks a wife, finds one in Thaisa (Leah
Haile), then chronicles the life and tough times of their child, Marina (also
Diedericks). That Diedericks doubles as narrator and Marina is something of a
jumpscare to those who know the text, as Shakespeare's original narrator is the
poet John Gower, though Harvey's choice to have Marina be our guide feels
definitely closer to home. Through various hijinks, Pericles comes to believe
he has lost both wife and daughter, then comes to realize he was mistaken, and,
in the best folkloric tradition, a joyful reunion crowns the proceedings, and
all ends happily.
The first few beats of Harvey's production begin on a slightly too-muted note.
While the emotional ease and openness eventually becomes a benefit, the first
couple scenes, where the young prince Pericles (Zach Wyatt) attempts to solve a
riddle that leads to his life being at stake in the land of Antioch, do cause
us to lean forward but in the uncomfortable way. That being said, Wyatt gives a
remarkable performance as the Prince of Tyre. The role of Pericles is something
of a dramatic coloring book, encouraging the actor to fill in the blank spaces
at will, and Wyatt creates a thoughtful soul who deserves the second chances
given to him in the play. The way Harvey has Wyatt speaking directly to
the audience, thereby casting us as "the gods" Pericles so often
interrogates, is a choice that yields dividends while at the same time being
exactly Shakespeare wanted (no fourth-wall in 1609).
The production really starts singing when we arrive in the land of Tarsus,
where Pericles assists the local king and queen by bringing corn in a time of
famine. As King Cleon, Chukwuma Omambala delivers a devastating speech on the
horrors of his country's starvation, and as he does, opens up the
production's heart with delightful results.
Cleon describes his nation's plight in the following terms:
"So sharp are hunger’s teeth that man and wife
Draw lots who first shall die to lengthen life.
Here stands a lord and there a lady weeping;
Here many sink, yet those which see them fall
Have scarce strength left to give them burial."
If read aloud, you could be forgiven for thinking this verse a little clunky
and obvious, but Omambala's delivery highlights a particular strength of this
production. Pericles is not a text known for its great
anthologized poetry: you won't find any instances of "oh, I didn't
realize that was from Pericles!" But, in the mouths of
the RSC actors, the emotional fabric of the language is real and tender:
it makes you forget how much ink has been spilled about swaths of this play
being written not by Shakespeare, but by George Wilkins, his contemporary and
probable collaborator. It's hard to overstate the benefit to a production when
the ensemble actually likes the play, and manages to access the power
underneath the verse which can overmaster any surface-level simplicity.
Such poetic revelations are notable in the mouth of Wyatt: listen (as it were)
to these two passages, the first where Pericles is looking at an armor
breastplate his now-dead father gave him, and which has been recovered from a
recent shipwreck:
"And though it was mine own, part of my heritage
Which my dead father did bequeath to me
With this strict charge even as he left his life,
“Keep it, my Pericles; it hath been a shield
’Twixt me and death,” and pointed to this brace,
“For that it saved me, keep it. In like necessity—
The which the gods protect thee from—may’t defend thee.”
It kept where I kept, I so dearly loved it,
Till the rough seas, that spares not any man,
Took it in rage, though calmed have given’t again.
I thank thee for’t; my shipwrack now’s no ill
Since I have here my father gave in his will."
And now this second passage, where Pericles remembers his father while he's
sitting in the merry company of his soon-to-be father-in-law (King Simonides,
played by Christian Patterson) and fiancée (Haile as Thaisa):
"Yon king’s to me like to my father’s picture,
Which tells me in that glory once he was—
Had princes sit like stars about his throne,
And he the sun for them to reverence.
None that beheld him but like lesser lights
Did vail their crowns to his supremacy."
I'd venture this stuff is more heartstring-tugging than report gives out.
Listening to this text performed by Harvey's company, and by Wyatt in
particular, makes one hear Pericles as a rhetorical bridge between the
raw, emotional bluntness of early period Shakespeare verse, and the layered,
nuanced strategies of his late-style: somehow this play has a foot in both, and
marries the straight-forward, no-nonsense communication of the early plays with
the lyric sensitivity of the romance genre to which Pericles belongs. If
Wilkins had a notable hand in the writing, he clearly did the play a great
service, just as John Fletcher did with The Two Noble Kinsmen, and
its devastating Jailer's Daughter subplot.
Patterson as Simonides brings a surprising amount of Midwestern dad sensibility
to his role for an actor based in the UK. His presence as the conduit between
his daughter and Pericles' meeting and falling in love provides a delightful
texture to the play's first half. The joy Patterson has on recognizing
their attraction during the jousting festival, combined with the wistful
sadness of eventually losing his daughter, encapsulates the fundamental heart
of Harvey's tale. In the words of Bob Dylan & Sam Shepard:
"strange how people who suffer together have stronger connections than
people who are most content." Productions of Pericles often hit
home in the final scenes, but this one manages to make the bittersweet tears
flow even before intermission. Falling in love with Pericles and Thaisa in
tandem as they fall in love with each other is a great joy.
The production's humor is a point of interest, as it tends toward the subtle
and the suggested. This is absolutely NOT the in-house style of
"Shakespeare funny" usually seen at Chicago Shakespeare Theater,
where Mistress Quickly has to mime a dick so we get the "prick of their
needles" joke, and the host organization suffers by comparison to their
overseas guests. Seeing the humor not need to be thumped -- in the vein of an
over-zealous waiter seeking to "tempt" you with dessert offerings --
is a major refresher.
The production stumbles in the second half. The delicate universe Harvey has
created is ill-suited to deal with the coarse and barbaric world of pirate
abduction and brothel trafficking that occurs to Marina once her narrative time
in the sun takes off. Many other pleasures abound, but the scenes in which
Marina maintains her chastity due to her inherent virtue, and thus repels all
would-be johns, feel out-of-place in this otherwise lilting, melodic world.
Those scenes need to be tough and disturbing and upsettingly funny as the sex
workers try unsuccessfully to pimp Marina to people whom she ends up converting
from deeds of wickedness. Here they stand uncomfortably apart, and not in
a productive manner. Similarly, Marina's abduction by pirates could have been
just so much wilder: it's one of the unique Pericles treasures, and
is there solely for our bewildered joy. Here, it feels like a tonal
stutter-step, and any opportunity to marry Shakespeare with Gilbert &
Sullivan goes unseized.
Small details merit cataloguing, like the inclusion of a newborn baby that
actually looks bloody and, well, newborn (a rarity in the sanitized world of
theatre). The added visual element of Pericles rewarding the fisherman, who
aided him in his quest to tourney for the hand of Thaisa, ties up that strand
with care. Harvey's decision to have Marina be the narrator (instead of an
omniscient Gower) is both commendable for sticking closer to the play's roster
of characters, and also for NOT making the horrendous decision made by TOO MANY
directors to turn Gower into a choral ensemble. In such productions (like the
one seen at American Players Theatre in 2017, directed by Eric Tucker),
seemingly any performer in the cast can step out at any moment and
begin speaking narration, to which I say: this play is complicated enough!
just make the narrator one person! please!! Harvey also avoids another original
sin of "creative" Pericles directors by not making young and
old Pericles and Thaisa different actors, and thus robbing us of the play's
final catharsis: another storytelling crime handily avoided.
A textual gem that Diedericks manages to highlight as the narrator (FKA Gower)
comes later in the play:
"By you being pardoned, we commit no crime
To use one language in each several clime
Where our scenes seems to live."
This knowing apology for multilingual liberties solidifies the words of Harold
Bloom, Shakespeare studies' most useful punching-bag: we underestimate
Shakespeare at our peril. Diedericks somehow makes this proto-Brechtian
commentary emotionally resonant, as we sit in the audience and go "you
know, that's actually a great point, and isn't it also great that theatre can
bridge our differences in magical ways??"
The crowning jewel of any production of Pericles is the reconciliation
between Marina and her father, and here the scene is unadorned and devastating.
No extra design elements are needed to paint the drama with a color called joy
beyond the actors' physical embodiment. Whatever hand George Wilkins had in the
earlier parts of the adventure, this is a scene where you hear language that,
whatever else, can be unabashedly called "Shakespearean":
"This is the rarest dream that e’er dull sleep
Did mock sad fools withal."
While it's possible that if you asked AI to recreate The Winter's Tale
it would give you similar text, I tend to agree with Tom Stoppard's character
Bernard in Arcadia that "you can't stick Byron's head in your
laptop." This reunion somehow manages to feel like King Lear
without the mess: in that Everest of tragedies, as well as in The Winter's
Tale, you have vivisecting meetings of parents and children after long
absences, sometimes even over the gulf of death. The factual deaths of Cordelia
and Mamilius render those plays' trauma so acute as to be almost overpowering.
The near-perfect ribbon-tying of Pericles manages to keep the linguistic
brilliance while removing the psychic horrors, thus making it possibly the most
moving denouement in Shakespeare. A stunning feat, and Wyatt and Diedericks
navigate the task to vicarious tears of joy.
Harvey often uses the cast as background movement to fill out the "poor
theatre" aesthetic: ropes and tackle suggest the nautical, with scenic
design by Jonathan Fensom. The movement direction is by
Annie-Lunnette Deakin-Foster, and while many Shakespeare directors fall
back on "movement pieces" to fill vacant spots in their artistic
vision, here you feel like the world of the play needed the helpful and
unassuming physicality on display. To engage in a bit of hyperbole, it felt
like the first time stylized movement actually helped a Shakespeare production.
The beat into intermission felt more like a comma than
a period, and the surprisingly unforgiving diagonals of CST's thrust stage
obscured the moment when Pericles eulogizes Simonides with the devastating line
"Heavens make a star of him!" But all in all, this side of Trevor
Nunn's Pericles at Theatre for a New Audience in 2016, this is as
poignant an interpretation as you're likely to see. Nunn may have the edge in
terms of rendering each individual land that Pericles traveled to as totally
unique: Antioch, Tyre, Tarsus, Pentapolis, Ephesus, and Mytilene, all were
totally distinct and pictorially thrilling under Nunn's direction. But I'd
reckon Harvey's production reaches deeper into the play's heart and gives you
more riches that you forgot or didn't realize were there, and makes the case for
the play not just as spectacle but as dramatic poetry.
If nothing else, to paraphrase a cliche, it's nice to know you haven't yet met
all the Shakespeare you're going to love.
