The renewed popularity of Pericles is one of the wonders of the age. Recently we had four productions in a single year. Now Kathryn Hunter has come up with a radical new version that has passages of fitful brilliance but that over-complicates this moving resurrection myth.
For a start Hunter treats the hero, in line with modern feminist criticism, as a guilt-haunted figure morally implicated in the sins he witnesses. To this end, she splits the role in two with Corin Redgrave as Pericles the Elder looking back in impotent anguish at the follies committed by Robert Luckay as his younger self. Thus he cries: "I could have saved her," of the incestuous Antiochus's daughter and looks helplessly on as he commits his own daughter, Marina, to foster care. But a dual-role device that was integral to Stoppard's The Invention of Love here looks wilfully imposed. It also fatally pre-empts Pericles's own long, Lear-like journey to self-recognition.
On top of this, Hunter turns the narrator figure of Gower into a West African "griot": a mixture of musical bard, family counsellor and historian. Patrice Naiambana fulfils all these roles with enormous buttonholing verve and charm. But I constantly felt there was too much emphasis on the teller rather than the tale. This Gower is so busy communing with the hero, chatting with the audience, or even hauling them up on stage that you begin to lose sight of Pericles's complex peregrinations.
Where Hunter's production scores is in its use of six aerialists to illustrate the story. At various points, as they swing vertiginously from the theatre galleries, they become the ship that carries Pericles on his journey round the Med. They also turn the tournament at Pentapolis into a spectacular modern Olympics as they hang upside down from ropes or dangle dangerously from circus hoops. Under the captaincy of Victoria McManus, they bring a touch of aerial magic to the Globe.
On the earthbound level, there is good work from Hilary Tones and Laura Rees who have an uncanny physical resemblance as Pericles's wife and daughter, and Redgrave himself brings the expected weight to the aged hero. If the final reconciliation scene is less moving than usual, it is because we have already had ample evidence of the hero's guilt and because by then this overloaded production has delighted us sufficiently.
· In rep until October 1. Box office: 020-7401 9919.
