★★★★☆
Four Stars
This lively production of Pericles, of which Shakespeare is believed to have written exactly half of the lines, is a highly creative, if not always smoothly unfolding, example of student drama. The audience enters the tiny – or intimate – Burton Taylor Studio to find the actors ranked in seats against the wall, in plain black costumes with appropriate accessories, but apparently out of character.
The production’s concept is an ambitious one: 47 characters are rendered by only seven actors. With a plot line as scattered as this travelling drama/comedy/romance, confusing the audience was a very real danger. One way the cast successfully negotiated the challenge, however, was by making intelligent use of simple, symbolic character markers in the costume shifts. Bright silken waistcoats, furs, the occasional royal bling, pirate bandanas, and PVC parkas were alternately donned by the actors as the scenes advanced from one side of the world to the other. Costume props were also used to serve the efficient portrayal of action, with for instance the death of the royal nurse Lychorida being conveyed by Gower, the narrator-figure, swinging a scarf over her nose and mouth from behind.
Costumes aside, the actual stage setting was turned into a makeshift map of the hero’s peregrinations, and some of the main narrative points (“MARINA R.I.P.”, for example). The characters took turns in tagging the pleasantly authentic brown paper which covered the stage background. This both helped our understanding of the play’s developments and hindered our enjoyment of their dramatization of it: while characters were engaged in pivotal moments of the plot, in the background their fellow actors would be squeakily and distractingly scribbling their current status (generally, the options were dead or alive).
The cast themselves were bursting with enthusiasm. The desperate King of Tarsus pulls off his balancing act between extravagance and self-pity, comic scepticism and heartfelt gratitude. The same actor had, in the opening scene, been a fabulously gaudy and truculent Antiochus, the incestuous King. Helicanus, Pericles’ councillor, was convincingly rigorous and upstanding as the loyal and straight-talking man of state. His capacity for conversion was also impressive, as he donned a coat of unforgettable pink mohair and lace night cap to play the Bawd. His nasal-voiced mincing was farcically over-the-top, as he literally vibrated with outrage at Marina’s virtuous triumph over the clients he presents her with.
He and his co-actress switched genders to play their respective roles as Pandar and Bawd. The transformation of Pandar’s posture, accent and tone was equally remarkable, given that instants beforehand she had been the nobly devout princess of Pentapolis, Pericles’ queen and mother to Marina. Likewise, she had been a good evil figure as Dionyza, the calculating and deceitful queen of Tarsus, boasting a brilliantly Machiavellian chuckle and two-faced facial expressions. Despite this drastic change in style, the grotesque pair made by Pandar and Pimp had the audience frankly laughing at their sheer lewdness, as they deftly played on lines like “are you a woman” (asked of an actor blatantly in drag).
Gower’s clear diction and dramatic poise warrant praise, as do his incredibly rapid metamorphoses in the “tournament” scene, in which he embodies a hilarious stream of caricatural princes vying for Thaisa’s hand in marriage. Her father, King Simonides, was an adorably contented figure, eager to see his daughter wed and not overly subtle about it either (notably, “What do you think of my daughter?”). Eavesdropping with delicious innocence, he carried off his portrayal of a besotted father and pliable king effectively. Marina, for her part, jumped around with a naive and gold-hearted playfulness which suited her reputation as a “paragon” of innocence and grace, and almost undoes the assassin Dionyza mandated to kill her out of envy.
The one low point in terms of acting was, astonishingly, the play’s hero, Pericles himself. He started off at a somewhat flat vocal level, so that his speech often sounded like a droning recitation He tripped up in a number of monologues or every few lines in the dialogues, and once or twice garbled scene endings, perhaps, in his defence, because of the rapid pace of the play. His body language was also distinctly jarring, perpetually cross armed, and if not then hands in pockets; while he seriously lacked virulence in his reactions (his horror at learning of the royal incest at Antiochus is quietly non-existent). Admittedly, the cast were not unilaterally perfect either, also occasionally stumbling in their lines. It must be said that Pericles’ performance improved vastly as he warmed up, as with his persuasively sheepish singing bit as he charms the Pentapolan court in a bid to win their trust (and their princess). Mercifully, he finally reached believable levels of dramatic engagement by the time his wife died in childbirth.
Pericles’ ingenious, hands-on approach to staging demonstrated great inventiveness. Self-consciously theatrical, it managed to join lighting to text thanks to a superbly in-sync tech crew. Stark, white lighting was a good choice for the first tragic crux of play, Thaisa’s “death”. And when Thaisa is more or less magically brought to life in the recovery scene, the dimmed, amber-tinted lighting and beam-strung fairy lights were a technical match for the scene’s live, mystical chanting, while her revival was mimicked by increasing the brightness.
All in all then, this production of Pericles is a really innovative take on a quite ramshackle, but fertile, piece of Shakespearean drama. Although things fell apart during the performance (crate tumbling, glasses spinning across the boards, the land “ridges” on the background map steadily falling off with surprisingly loud clatters), setting and props were fantastically exploited by the imaginative team.
On a side note, it’s always good to see a production break from gender specificity, and the earnestness with which the actors take on their multiple roles testifies that they – rightly – fear no ridicule. With live guitar playing and singing, they are versatile and deft at keeping the stage feeling like an on-going party. And if the price of boisterousness is a slight tendency for miniature technical catastrophes, this cast is far too compelling and creative for us to hold it against them, and Pericles makes for a riotous, genuinely fun night of theatre.
