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by William Shakespeare, directed by Scott Wentworth

Stratford Festival, Tom Patterson Theatre, Stratford

May 30-September 19, 2015

Gower: Thus time we waste, and longest leagues make short;

    Sail seas in cockles, have an wish but for't;

    Making, to take your imagination,

    From bourn to bourn, region to region.

The Stratford Festival is presenting Shakespeare’s play Pericles, Prince of Tyre, for the first time since 2003, only the fourth production in the Festival’s history, the first in 1973 being so popular it was revived the following year.  While director Leon Rubin, who pointlessly retitled the play The Adventures of Pericles, emphasized visual spectacle over substance in his production of 2003, current director Scott Wentworth is determined that the audience take the play and its themes seriously.  It is an admirable aim and the play is filled with fine performances, but many of Wentworth’s decisions cause the storytelling of the epic narrative to be less clear than they should be. 

Pericles has lain under a cloud since Shakespeare’s death because it was not included in the First Folio of 1623 whose 36 plays scholars took as the canonical plays by Shakespeare.  Now, however, due to advances in textual scholarship, plays not included in the First Folio – such as Pericles, The Two Noble Kinsmen and Edward III - have been identified as at least in part by Shakespeare and are now part of the canon.  An upsurge in estimation occurred when the great Canadian critic Northrop Frye (1912-1991) identified it as part of a fourth category of Shakespeare’s play that he termed “romances”.  These plays – Pericles (c.1607), Cymbeline (1610), The Winter’s Tale (1611), The Tempest (1611) and The Two Noble Kinsmen (1613) – all concern the cycle of life from birth, death to rebirth, all emphasize the art of storytelling through theatre and all, because of their view of man's relation to providence, feature divine intervention.  This last feature makes them unlike ordinary comedies where human ingenuity is sufficient to solve the problems humans have made.  

Pericles is the only play by Shakespeare other than Henry V (1599) to have a chorus who narrates the story and fills in gaps in the action that Shakespeare does not depict.  It is also the only play by Shakespeare where the chorus is named, in this case as Gower, after the poet John Gower (c.1330-1408), whose Confessio Amantis (1393) provides the main plot.  Quite unlike the Chorus in Henry V, Gower speaks not in iambic pentameter but in iambic tetrameter in imitation of John Gower’s own style. 

Shakespeare’s Gower tells an episodic tale that covers Pericles’ life from his youth to his old age and takes his hero through lands all around the Mediterranean.  While Rubin changed the location from the ancient Mediterranean  to the Far East, Wentworth keeps Shakespeare’s original setting but moves the period from Hellenistic times to the 19th century.  Doing this gives the production the effect of a stage adaptation of one of Dickens’ episodic novels, like the Royal Shakespeare’s Company’s famous version of The Life and Adventures of Nicholas Nickleby (1980).

After Gower’s Prologue we meet young Pericles (Evan Buliung), who has been tempted by the riddle of King Antiochus of Antioch (Wayne Best).  Antiochus claims that whoever answers the riddle correctly will win the hand of his daughter (Deborah Hay).  In fact, the daughter is simply a lure and the riddle a sadistic trick.  Whoever answers the riddle correctly will also die because the answer reveals the incestuous relationship that Antiochus has with his daughter.  Pericles does solve the riddle and therefore Antiochus plans his assassination.  Fleeing Antioch is the beginning of his adventures.

Fearing that Antiochus will continue to hunt him down, Pericles sails for Tarsus where famine rages.  Pericles gives food to the governor Cleon (Sean Arbuckle) and his wife Dionyza (Claire Lautier) and sets sail again.  This time he is shipwrecked in Pentapolis, where King Simonides (Wayne Best again) is holding a tournament with the hand of his daughter Thaisa (Deborah Hay again) as the prize.  Pericles enters the tournament as an unknown knight and, as in a fairy tale, wins Thaisa, who had secretly favoured him. 

Over time the Tyrians grow unhappy with Pericles’ absence and demand that he return.  On the sea journey back to Tyre, the now-pregnant Thaisa dies in childbirth, and the captain orders that the body be buried at sea.  To keep his daughter Marina (Deborah Hay again) safe, Pericles leaves her to be raised with Cleon and Dionyza.  Unbeknownst to Pericles and Marina, Thaisa’s coffin washes up in Ephesus, where the court physician Cerimon (David Collins), realizes that Thaisa is not dead and successfully revives her.  Believing that Pericles is dead, she becomes a priestess in the temple of the goddess Diana.  What grips us in the rest of Gower’s tale is the question of how Pericles, Thaisa and Marina will ever come to be together again after being separated for so long a gap of time. 

As the director, Wentworth is very keen to show that there is an underlying structure to this episodic story.  That is why he has Best play both the evil Antiochus and the good Simonides and Hay play Antiochus’ unfortunate daughter as well as Simonides’ fortunate daughter.  When Wentworth has Hay also play Marina, we do have to wonder, should the family reunite, how Hay will play two characters at the same time. 

Wentworth also tries to unify the action by continually reusing the same props.  This is especially true of a bed which begins as that of Antiochus’ daughter and becomes the marriage bed of Pericles and Thaisa, Thaisa’s birthing bed and deathbed, the bed in the house of prostitution into which Marina has been sold and finally the bed where the hopeless, aged Pericles thinks he will die.  This ploy transforms the bed into a symbol of the interconnection of good, evil, life, death and rebirth.

While Wentworth’s doubling of characters may interest those who know the play, it could very well hinder the understanding of those who are new to the play.  This is especially the case with the roles given Marion Adler.  In the programme, she is identified as the goddess Diana.  Yet, she leads a group of women dressed like Eastern Orthodox nuns, each with white habit rather than black, and a tall, cylindrical kalimavkion, who collectively sing or speak the words of Gower.  In the later Pentapolis scenes she plays Lychorida, nurse to the young Mariana.  And at the end, she plays Thaisa to make the family reunion possible.  Since, unlike the other actors, Adler makes no change of costume to play these other characters, what are we to think?  Is Diana along with her priestesses actually telling her own story?  Was Diana masquerading as Thaisa when Pericles wooed her?  Did Diana somehow split herself in two to be both in Ephesus as revived Thaisa and in Pentapolis to be Lychorida?  Needless to say, Adler’s doubling only makes a straightforward narrative confusing.      

A further problem is that Wentworth does not restrict the Chorus to storytelling but allows it to interfere in the action.  In Shakespeare’s play Diana intervenes only to tell the aged Pericles to travel to Ephesus.  Wentworth, however, has his Diana/Gower and her maidens appear to exert their influence several times, most notably in actively helping Pericles win his fight in Pentapolis to win Thaisa.  This victory should be Pericles’ own.

Shakespeare’s Gower does not interfere.  Like the Chorus in Henry V, he constantly appeals to the audience’s imagination to fill in the details of his story: “What now ensues, to the judgment of your eye / I give, my cause who best can justify”.  Wentworth’s use of an interfering Chorus skews the meaning of the play in one direction.  It becomes a simple demonstration of the effects of Providence in Pericles’ life.  Yet, there are other sides to the story.  Given the Hellenistic setting it is hard not to relate the action to Greek tragedy, especially those by Euripides like Alcestis (438bc) that arrive at a happy ending through divine intervention. 

Pericles’ pride that he can solve Antiochus’ riddle is very like the tragic hero’s hubris and Pericles’ punishment for that hubris is a life constantly on the run from death.  Given the Mediterranean setting with ancient Tyre now located in Lebanon, Pericles’ “adventures” may be a divine trial like that of the biblical Job, who is tested by having everything taken away only to receive it back again because of his patience.  This notion seems present in one of Pericles’ greatest insights: “I see that Time's the king of men, / He’s both their parent, and he is their grave, / And gives them what he will, not what they crave”.

While all of Shakespeare’s romances do concern the influence of Providence, to depict it helping out a hero at every step weakens the play because it prevents us from seeing the action from the human point of view.  We have to see how the main characters’ successes and failures are real to them or else they become merely puppets.

Wentworth adds further confusion by not having the group of priestesses act solely as the custodians of the narrative.  At times he has the entire cast speak Gower’s lines as the kind of individualized chorus that John Caird and Trevor Nunn used in the original Nicholas Nickleby, later repeated by Jonathan Church and Philip Franks in the revival.  Either Wentworth should choose one person or one group as Gower or choose the whole cast as Gower, but to mingle both in the some production ruins Shakespeare’s examination of the role of storyteller as mediator between past and present, myth and reality. 

Though Wentworth’s directorial choices muddy the storytelling and the themes of the play, he  still has drawn powerful performances from nearly the entire cast.  Chief of these is Even Buliung, who shows he is fully equal to the challenges of Pericles, the only character in Shakespeare who travels from youth to old age in the course of a single play.  He is masterful in communicating the meaning of his lines and charting Pericles’ emotions from joy to despair.  He is able to layer emotions so that a glimmer of hope or dread can appear with a mere change of intonation.  In his final reunion with his family, he shows how newfound joy struggles to overcome long-accustomed pain.  Buliung’s is certainly the finest performance of the role I’ve seen since Geraint Wyn Davies played it at Stratford back in 1986.

Deborah Hay is also equal to the challenge of playing three extremely different female roles.  As Antiochus’ mostly silent daughter, she appears eerily calm in the face of doom.  Under Wentworth’s direction she goes perhaps too far in providing a contrast in the giddily cheerful Thaisa, who likes to say “Ping ping” when dubbing the knights contesting for her hand.  Her richest portrayal is as Marina where she accomplishes the difficult task of making virtue even more compelling than vice.

In other roles, Wayne Best radiates an aura of evil as Antiochus with slow, precise speech and movements.  But just as Wentworth has Hay overdo her contrasting Thaisa, he has Best overdo his contrasting Simonides, who appears more like a giggling, skipping clown than the moral centre of his kingdom. 

Sean Arbuckle and Claire Lautier have fine scenes together as Cleon and Dionyza of Tarsus.  They may be united in despair when faced with famine, but they grow in opposite moral directions when that has passed.    Lautier shows how Dionyza’s outlook slides from gratitude to jealousy to evil, making her a forerunner of the evil Queen in Cymbeline.  Arbuckle’s Cleon, in contrast, has remained grateful and is shocked into helplessness when he learns of Dionyza’s plan to kill Marina.

Among the representatives of good, Marion Adler radiates the same calm nobility of spirit in all her roles from Diana to the Thaisa as an old woman.  Stephen Russell, who plays Helicanus, Pericles’ regent in his absence, is a man struggling not to have care wear him down.  David Collins, as Cerimon, the physician who revivifies Thaisa, speaks with a sense of awe for the powers he has at his command.  In contrast, Antoine Yared is too ineffectual to make Lysimachus’ conversion from sin to virtue believable.

Among the representatives of evil, E.B. Smith is suitably menacing as Thaliard the would-be assassin of Pericles and as Leonine, the would-be assassin of Marina.  Wentworth tries to focus the comedy in the play in the court of Simonides in Pentapolis when it more obviously resides in the brothel scenes in Mytilene.  Keith Dinicol as a dandified Pander and Randy Hughson as the rough-and-tumble Bolt do their best to bring out the comedy of these scenes but Brigit Wilson as the Bawd is too strident to match them, not having decided if her character is sinister or foolish.

Pericles can be a play that is both exciting and emotionally rewarding and with Buliung in the title role and Hay as Thaisa and Marina this could have been more fully the case in the current production.  Wentworth’s mishandling of Gower as the chorus, his use of doubling and his pursuit of only one view of the play at the expense of others make this seldom-performed play less easy to follow and understand than it should be.  Yet, the play comes around so infrequently that anyone who loves The Winter’s Tale and The Tempest really should see Pericles to experience situations and themes in their rawest form that Shakespeare will return to and refine.  Wentworth needed only to be as straightforward in his direction as Shakespeare is with his narrative for this Dickensian version of the tale to be successful.        

©Christopher Hoile

Note: This review is a Stage Door exclusive.

Photo: Evan Buliung (centre) as Pericles with the ensemble; Deborah Hay as Thaisa and Evan Buliung as Pericles; Randy Hughson and Keith Dinicol (background) David Collins as Cerimon and Deborah hay as Thiasa (centre). ©2015 David Hou.

For tickets, visit www.stratfordfestival.ca.