pericles
the stratford festival
the national post

Very late on in Shakespeare's Pericles the hero, who has just been reconciled with his long lost daughter, has a vision of the goddess Diana, who tells him where he can find his even longer-lost wife. This is Diana's first and only appearance in the play, as generally printed and produced. In the new Stratford production, directed by Scott Wentworth, she appears much earlier. In fact she speaks the prologue. Stratford this year is into messing about with Shakespeare's openings: see also the revised Induction to The Taming of the Shrew. That isn't a criticism, merely an observation.

In fact, or at least in most scholarly opinion, Pericles isn't wholly Shakespeare's. A picaresque romance that initiated his magical final period, it was written in collaboration with, or based on an earlier piece by, a notorious Jacobean hack, George Wilkins. Or: Wilkins wrote a novelization of a wildly popular show (strange as it may seem to us, Pericles was in its own time Shakespeare's greatest hit) and portions of his book somehow seeped into the corrupt text through which the play has come down to us, Pericles having been left out of the First Folio, the original Collected Works.

There's an even earlier scribe involved: John Gower, a medieval versifier whose own Pericles poem was a major source for the play, and who makes recurrent personal appearance in it as Chorus, speaking in archaic rhyming couplets which it is comforting to blame on Wilkins. Stratford has banished Gower, replacing him as noted with Diana, at least at the beginning. Later choral material is distributed among the company at large, with the actors helpfully speaking the lines that refer to their own characters. For the second time in recent weeks I was reminded of Nicholas Nickleby, a connection reinforced by Wentworth's decision to do the play in Dickensian costume. Stovepipe hats and frock coats are odd fashion choices for a piece whose cast is largely composed of ancient or mythical eastern potentates and whose action includes a chivalric tournament, but after a time you take it for granted and forget it. 

Pericles, Prince of Tyre (to give both play and character their official title) begins at the court of Antiochus, King of Antioch, where young Pericles seeks the hand of the king's daughter. To win her, he has to answer a riddle whose solution is that father and daughter are incestuously linked. If he gets it wrong he will be killed; if he gets it right he will be killed, but more secretively. Sensing his no-win situation Pericles takes a hasty leave and goes a-voyaging. He visits Tarsus, and relieves a famine there. A storm throws him ashore at Pentapolis where he again courts the king's daughter, this time more propitiously. In a second seastorm his bride Thaisa supposedly dies in childbirth, and her body is thrown overboard; only, of course, she isn't really dead. Pericles deposits their baby daughter, named Marina on account of her sea-birth, with the presumably grateful inhabitants of Tarsus, and sails back home to Tyre. For some unexplained reason, given his earlier propensity for travel, he waits 16 years before returning to check up on his child, and is then told that she is dead. The governor's wife, jealous of her beauty and virtue, had planned to have her murdered; she has, however, been rescued by pirates who sold her to a brothel, whose proprietors she comes close to ruining when her eloquence and purity send all the customers away vowing chastity. The brothel is located in Mytilene, and it's here that the despairing Pericles' ship just happens to put in. Coincidence, in this play, is destiny. He has one final port of call: Ephesus, where Diana's temple is.

So she earns her place as the production's controlling force, a virgin goddess rewarding virtue. I'm not so sure, though, that she and her attendant vestals need to make as many personal appearances as they do here; in a play crowded with ceremonies they seem to be officiating at every one of them. Pericles himself makes a strange protagonist; he's on furlough for much of the play's second half, when the writing takes on nerve and sinew - when in fact it becomes Shakespearean - and even when present he has hardly any distinguishing qualities; he's just a presumably decent guy to whom things happen. Evan Buliung gives him a shy, questing quality, a conscientious optimism that crumbles when apparent disaster overtakes and he retreats into catatonia, refusing to eat, speak or shave until the miraculous reappearance of his daughter. Deborah Hay plays all three of the major women in his life: as the siren princess of the first scene she's almost silent, mysterious and enticing; as Thaisa, she's sincere with a hint of simper; as Marina, she seems at first almost too quietly innocent. But then, in an about-turn comparable to her electric reversal in The Shrew, she flares up; confronting her unknown and unknowing father, she joins him in making this long-delayed recognition scene as moving as it should be. What really brings us on the tears is that Pericles himself hardly dares to believe it; he gropes his way towards the truth and, when the dam finally bursts, his joy, delicately rendered, is overpowering.

The attendant grandees include Wayne Best, switching from a very bad king and father to a craftily nice one, who might have stepped out of a pack of cards; Sean Arbuckle as a neurotic governor and David Collins as a healing one; E. B. Smith playing two assassins, both thwarted; and, best of all, Stephen Russell as Pericles' faithful counsellor, looking touchingly pained when his boss affectionately refers to him as "ancient", and also coping tactfully with what must be the worst couplet ever penned by Shakespeare, Wilkins, or anybody else: "No, Escanes, learn this of me/Antiochus from incest lived not free." (Escanes in this production seems to be an admiral though he hardly ever goes to sea.) In the brothel scenes, the trio of pander, bawd and pimp (Keith Dinicol, Brigit Wilson, Randy Hughson) have the scabrous appeal of characters from a novel that Dickens wasn't allowed to write; here, the Victorian setting actually fits. Even when it doesn't, the play works its peculiar magic and the production keeps faith with it.