Photo: Tristram Kenton
On paper, it sounds intriguing: a collaboration between the Royal Shakespeare Company and Cardboard Citizens, the UK's only company for homeless people, staged in a large warehouse near London's Old Kent Road. But, while I admired the intention, I found the three-hour show something to be endured more than enjoyed.
It begins promisingly. The audience are treated as detainees in an asylum- processing centre. We are checked in, issued with tags and shepherded into a vast hall, where we sit at desks and are confronted by intimidatingly complex immigration forms. Various refugees leap up and tell their stories before being officially silenced. We then get homiletic lectures on the virtues of Shakespeare, English and the royal family before selected detainees launch spontaneously into a retelling of Pericles.
However briefly, one gets a sense of the shock of being a stranger at the mercy of a vast bureaucratic machine, and nothing that follows quite matches that initial unease. Treating Shakespeare's Pericles as if he were a prototype asylum seeker seems faintly spurious in that he is actually a prince protected by fate, not an impoverished victim of tyranny. And, by keeping the audience moving from one vast hall to another, Adrian Jackson's production further fragments an already episodic narrative.
Some of the linking narration, replacing that of Shakespeare's Gower, is quite funny: "So Pericles remains alone in Tarsus/ Where people believe the sun shines from his arsus." Individual scenes are well staged: when wrecked on the shores of Pentapolis, Pericles arrives in a launderette swimming in water and bedecked with old clothes. Christopher Simpson and Kevork Malikyan as the younger and older Pericles are also vocally impressive, and the latter's reunion with Jasmine Hyde's Marina has its traditional effect.
I found the attempt to interweave real-life refugee experience with Shakespeare's medieval fable disquieting in the wrong sense. Having become engrossed by tragically authentic stories of loss and separation, I found it difficult to be suddenly yanked back into Shakespeare's geographically restless romance. I gather that this show sprang out of a workshop in which an hour-long Pericles was followed by personal testimony from asylum seekers. I suspect that was more successful than this attempt to combine the two, which left me, rather like Shakespeare's Gertrude, craving "more matter with less art".
· Until August 10. Box office: 0845 120 7543.
