Dominic Dromgoole’s production of Pericles augurs well for a five-month season of Shakespeare’s late plays at this intimate, discreetly lit theatre, which seems ideally suited to works of fable, romance and supernatural visitations. Even if the production’s irony occasionally turns to jokiness, it also reminds us why audiences have come to love this geographically restless play.
The programme makes no bones about attributing the text to “William Shakespeare and George Wilkins”. But one of the play’s excitements comes in the moment when the jog-trot verse of the first two acts gives way to authentic Shakespeare in a sea storm, where Pericles cries: “Thou god of this great vast, rebuke these surges.” That scene is beautifully staged here, as James Garnon’s Pericles perilously clings to the ship’s tackle and even the suspended candelabra sway in response to the onrushing wind.
But, if the play moves one, it is because it appeals to our deep-seated hunger for resurrection myths. Pericles’s coffined wife, Thaisa, is restored to life by an artful physician and, at the play’s end, the desolate hero is revivified by his long-lost daughter, Marina, in a way that poignantly anticipates The Winter’s Tale.
This production brings a refreshing humour to the hero’s ceaseless adventures around the Med. Macho men posture vaingloriously before the tournament at Pentapolis, wrestle feverishly in the theatre’s corridors, and, in a celebratory dance, surrender helplessly to ardent female groupies.
My only quibble is that the sleazy realism of the scenes where Marina lands up in a Mytilene brothel are played too much for laughs: the line where a desperate pandar declares, “the poor Transylvanian is dead that lay with the little baggage”, evoking a world of pre-Hogarthian squalor, becomes the excuse for an extended riff about funny foreigners. This tends to diminish the transformative power of Marina’s chastity in a corrupt world of commercialised sex and threatened rape.
But this is a rare blot on a production that captures the play’s joint obsession with the marine and the miraculous. Along with Garnon’s stoically suffering Pericles, there is fine work from Dorothea Myer-Bennett wittily doubling as the virtuous Thaisa and the murderous Dionyza, Jessica Baglow as the life-giving Marina, and Sheila Reid as the storytelling Gower who, not unlike the Chorus in Henry V, steers us from place to place while asking us to use our imaginations. In a production where Jonathan Fensom’s design, Claire van Kampen’s music and Sian Williams’ choreography combine the nautical with the numinous, it is an invitation to which we readily respond.
• At Sam Wanamaker Playhouse, London, until 21 April. Box office: 020-7401 9919.
