This Storm-Tossed Hero Goes the Extra Distance

The Adventures of Pericles
The Stratford Festival
The National Post

One of Shakespeare's last and most unruly plays, Pericles is also one of the few in the canon to employ a full-time narrator. He is John Gower, medieval poet, and he returns from the grave to tell the story. Or, as he puts it in the first of the endearingly clunky couplets that make up his role: "To sing a song that old was sung / From ashes ancient Gower is come."

Leon Rubin's Stratford production takes this hint with bewitching literalness. At the beginning of the show the entire stage is swathed in white, billowing silk; it undulates like the ocean on which much of the action will take place. Up through a trap door shoots the figure of Gower himself, in his underpants, his head and body also painted completely white. A transfixing figure even before he opens his mouth, he turns out to be even more compelling when he does. Thom Marriott, who came to notice as a steely Warwick in Rubin's Henry VI productions last year, here manages the surprising feat of tempering the steel with whimsy. His is a resourceful, playful and magisterially resonant performance, and it places him on the top shelf of Stratford actors.

The story into which he so seductively draws us is a picaresque, of a kind Jacobean audiences seem to have lapped up. Its hero begins as a self-cast Prince Charming, seeking the hand of the daughter of the King of Antioch. He recoils on discovering that she is committing incest with her father, who would kill him for the knowledge, and spends the next three acts as a royal refugee. En route he scoops up the more moral daughter of a more benevolent king but is shortly parted both from her and their daughter, the sea- birthed infant Marina. A 20-minute intermission allows the child to grow up 14 years and to face down threats to her own life and virtue. The key at the end is reunion.

At Stratford, once the silks have been dispersed, we find ourselves looking at the outlines of a ship. The masts and tackle frame the acting area, and the play's succession of far-flung locales takes shape within them. The action of Pericles has been described as a whistle-stop tour of the Near East; Rubin, who has worked extensively in Asia, and designer John Pennoyer push it farther and take us round the Middle and Far Easts instead. As far as I can tell, Arabs inhabit Antioch; Turks live in Tarsus, where Pericles relieves a famine and is scurvily treated for his pains; the Japanese rule Pentapolis, where he enters a martial-arts contest to win the hand of his bride, Thaisa (or should she be Thai?); and Indians appear to have colonized Ephesus, where the same lady undergoes a miracle cure at the hands of a boy swami on whom the play's great leap in time has no visible effect whatsoever. All this, abetted by Bruce Gaston's music and Donna Feore's choreography, is magic, taking up all the cues for showmanship that are built into the play.

The play's problem is its hero, who has no striking characteristics, apart perhaps from all-round decency; he is simply someone to whom things happen. Jonathan Goad does more than most to individualize him. He's an impetuous young man, running cheerfully into danger in the first scene, though with enough sense to get out of it quick; and he matures into an impetuous older one. It takes time; in the long scene in which he meets his daughter, he has to be drawn out of the catatonia to which he succumbed when he lost her. (He also stopped shaving.)

Once brought alive, though, he can hardly contain himself; even when her identity has been established, he can't stop himself demanding further proof, just for the joy of it. The humour here is probably the actor's rather than the character's, but it makes the scene even more affecting than usual. Technically, Goad has still to discover legato; he bounces up and down on the lines, rather than letting them flow. But then, as Pericles is buffeted by fate, so any actor who plays him gets knocked about by the text, which is so corrupt that it never made it into the First Folio. It improves spectacularly as it goes along, but its first two acts, where the character has to be established, are in wretched shape. It must be hard for an actor to get an emotional purchase on it. Lear and Cordelia, Pericles and Marina: Fathers and daughters provide the most moving moments in Shakespeare.

Nazneen Contractor does her part in the duet with a determination that would rouse any hypochondriac from his stupor. She lacks the unforced grace that should cling to these fairy princesses as of right, but she's a fighter -- a quality that has previously served her well in Mytilene, where Marina is sold into a brothel and talks her way out of it.

This, however, is the one part of the show where the exoticism gets out of hand -- though maybe Rubin is trying to show us the underside of The King and I. The brothel staff speak in prose, usually a sure sign that Shakespeare, whatever the plot says, was thinking of home. We should recognize these people, as he certainly did. The trappings come between the actors and their reality, and also between them and the jokes. Michael Therriault gets most of his prescribed laughs as Boult, the assistant pimp (the richest, if hardly the longest, part in the play), but it's a strain. Sarah McVie, in a surprising role for last year's Cordelia, makes an admirably businesslike Bawd.

A trio of fishermen put in a more respectable word for the working class, with Robert King especially good as the skipper. That's back in Pentapolis, where Karen Ancheta makes an unconventionally pert Thaisa. I could have done with more wryness and maturity than Charles Azulay brings to her father, a well- meaning monarch trying to give his blessing to two young people who are mad about one another anyway but are bent on playing Romeo and Juliet.

In all, the production is a delight; and, coming at the end of a most uneven opening week, it's a fair haven such as might have been welcomed by the storm-tossed Pericles himself.