Lakeside Pericles a Lovely Treat
pericles
The Festival of Classics
the national post
Only half of Pericles, Prince of Tyre is generally thought to be by Shakespeare. The first two of the play's five acts are usually palmed off on an unsavoury hack called George Wilkins, and they contain rhyming couplets of a lameness that one wouldn't wish even on him. Oddly enough, these are far less worrisome when heard than when read. Pericles, more than any other Shakespeare play, is a story -- a picaresque fairy tale, in fact -- and you take it as it comes; given a suitably magical staging, everything in it evens out. John Wood's production is lovely, taking full advantage of Oakville's peerless lakeside setting and is very neat and sensitive on its own account.
It begins with young prince Pericles discovering the powerful monarch Antiochus is living in sin with his own daughter. In a barbed line that suggests Shakespeare had at least some input into the play's opening, Pericles thanks the king for teaching "my frail mortality to know itself"; and that -- the vulnerability of the human animal to fate and fortune -- is perhaps the nearest the play has to an overriding theme.
Our hero spends the next dozen scenes on the run from the vengeful Antiochus and in the process endures more than his statistical share of shipwrecks and storms at sea. He woos and wins the beautiful Thaisa (a princess, of course), who apparently dies in childbirth during one of those tempests.
Her body is thrown overboard to appease the sailors, and Pericles' newborn daughter, Marina, is brought up by untrustworthy allies. When she is 16, her beauty and accomplishments provide unfair competition to their own child.
Rescued by pirates (in the nick of time, also of course), she is sold into a brothel, where she remains obstinately untouched. Finally, by beautiful coincidence, she is reunited with her father, whose grief has turned him silent and misanthropic. This father- daughter reunion -- by accident or design, this first of Shakespeare's last plays is much concerned with fathers and daughters -- hardly carries the emotional freight of the one in King Lear but it casts a comparable spell. Certainly it does here, staged and played with great delicacy and great economy.
Wood's production, in casual modern dress, is throughout both playful and trusting, with evocative traces of set (Michael Gianfrancesco) and beautiful lighting (Michael Kruse). A sail makes a ship, while for the last scene, in the Temple of Diana, a graceful set of columns appear, apparently from nowhere, as do a row of white lamps. The immensely long entrances possible in this space are as beguiling as ever. There has also been some nifty textual editing. The acting is less authoritative than we are used to here (and also less audible, especially with the lake providing independent storm effects) but this play can take it. Its characters are not subtle and as a person its hero hardly exists; he is merely somebody to whom things happen.
Jonathan Eliot plays Pericles with a generalized down-home nice- guyness (a Prince of Canadian Tyre, perhaps) but manages to rise above it in the reconciliation, which gives him his one chance to act. Patrick Garrow is earnestly easy-going as the narrator Gower. Krista Sutton makes an unexpectedly mischievous Thaisa and John Fitzgerald Jay is smooth as her kingly father, a genial despot in naval togs.
Deborah Hay is not, to be unchivalrous, the radiant nonpareil the text suggests for Marina (and for just about every other Shakespearean heroine) but she plays her with a schoolgirlish determination that is refreshing in itself and also makes her survival in the whorehouse seem remarkably plausible.
Michael McLachlan does a similarly believable job on the town governor, who arrives as a customer and leaves a devoted (and, of course, successful) wooer. Melee Hutton makes a flinty impression as a sort of wicked- stepmother-by-default, and the brothel scenes ("Shakespeare at his most characteristic," somebody once said) are brought to life in most businesslike fashion by Michael Krek as an oily pander, by Chick Reid as a blowsy bawd and above all by Blaine Bray as their grumbling underling.
The three drive onstage in a red truck with matching caravan, from whence their professional operations are conducted. A similarly delightful touch is a silent vignette of Marina and her guardians' daughter sewing together; the outclassed companion drops too many stitches and leaves in tears. This is typical of the production in being funny and inventive, and in not being overdone. Productions of Pericles are still rare, and this is an ideal one see.