How do you give unity to Pericles? It has a rambling narrative that takes us round the Med in 14 years and is clearly the work of Shakespeare and a lesser writer: you can actually hear, rather than see, the join at the start of the third act. Declan Donnellan’s answer to the problems in this production for Cheek By Jowl’s French ensemble, which has previously given us an impressive Andromaque and Ubu Roi, is to set the entire action in a hospital ward. It makes for a briskly ingenious evening (only 100 minutes) but one that robs the play of much of its unearthly magic.
The show starts with a prolonged passage showing doctors and nurses anxiously tending a seriously ill patient. I assumed that what follows is the morphine-induced fantasy of a dying man who imagines himself losing, and then being reunited with, his loved ones.
Everything, however, is kept strictly within the confines of the ward. The patient, Pericles, empties a piss-pot over his head to evoke a storm at sea. The fishermen who rescue him from a shipwreck become nurses dutifully giving him a naked rub-down. When his wife, Thaisa, seemingly dies in childbirth, she is whisked off on a trolley and later reappears in a zip-up body-bag to be restored to life by a dictatorial consultant.
I admire the skill with which Donnellan and his designer, Nick Ormerod, find medical solutions to every situation: a public tournament at Pentapolis turns into a dust-up in the hospital corridor with Pericles, although strapped in a straitjacket, coming out on top. But the production creates as many problems as it solves. If you don’t know the play well – or even if you do – some of the rapid transitions are puzzling. The play has been shorn of its narrator, Gower, who originally acted as a geographical guide.
While the story includes bewildering narrative shifts, such as the abduction of Pericles’s daughter in Tarsus and her reappearance in a brothel in Mytilene, they here become doubly confusing since a small troupe of seven actors play multiple roles.
Donnellan is clearly suggesting that Pericles’ journey takes place in the mind; and certainly post-op drugs do strange things to the imagination. But the power of Shakespeare’s play, here co-attributed to George Wilkins, is that it endows Pericles’ physical travels, and travails, with a touch of the visionary and mystical. Even Donnellan, however, is pushed to find a parallel to the resurrected Thaisa’s transformation into a priestess of Diana. The great climactic father-daughter reunion is also less moving if neither participant has, in reality, ever left the emergency ward.
The French actors – and there are helpful surtitles – are themselves very good. Christophe Grégoire as Pericles has the right look of shaggy desperation. Camille Cayol as, among many other things, a sexually uninhibited Thaisa, Cécile Leterme as an authoritative doctor, Valentine Catzéflis as a spiritually driven Marina and Xavier Boiffier as a lordly brothel-patron all impress. Yet, while the production displays undeniable cleverness, I was left feeling that an epic romance had been turned into a modest chamber-work with occasional echoes of Casualty.
• Pericles (Périclès, Prince de Tyr) is at the Barbican, London, until 21 April. Box office: 020-7638 8891.
