On an off-day or two or more, Shakespeare wrote “Pericles.” Or did he even? Scholars now generally credit the obscure writer and innkeeper George Wilkins for the first two of the five acts. No wonder then, that, when produced, the most memorable moments reliably arise in its last scenes, a duo of emotional family reunifications that brought Shakespeare as close as he ever came to writing a Nicholas Sparks-like tearjerker.
The play presents a mishmash of elements. Its setting and chorus and deity references belong to ancient Greece, but the narrator is Chaucer-era poet John Gower. It depicts a series of episodes that leap forward in time and place, that switch tones on a dime from the tragic to the comic, although sometimes you can’t tell if that turn is intentional in the writing, or just clunkiness.
This visiting Royal Shakespeare Company production, which premiered in Stratford-Upon-Avon, England, earlier this year and now marks a new, ongoing relationship with Chicago Shakespeare, certainly can’t be called clunky. Directed by the company’s new co-leader Tamara Harvey, this staging is as graceful as can be.
In the set design from Jonathan Fensom, a collection of hanging ropes get repositioned to represent different settings and to simulate shipwrecks (there’s more than one — fortune is fickle). Musicians at the back of the stage provide a score composed by Claire van Kampen that helps establish the tone at any given moment; a sweet-sounding flute might be followed by ominously energetic percussion. And most of all, the large ensemble (over a dozen) pose theatrically and dance elegantly as they play the inhabitants of multiple locales.
Some productions emphasize the cultural differences of these places as dashing and brave Pericles (a genial Zach Wyatt) moves from Antioch (where his solving of a riddle to win a bride goes wrong) to Tyre (his home, which he must leave to avoid a murderer sent to follow him) to Tarsus (where he brings food to the starving) to Pentapolis (where he lands after shipwreck No. 1 and finally wins his wife Thaisa, played with an easygoing, likable modesty by Leah Haile), and finally to Mitylene, where he finds the family he’s lost along the way.
Not here. This version doesn’t emphasize difference from one place to the next; there are no altered accents, nor are there changed wigs and color palettes in Kinnetia Isidore’s costume design. Harvey focuses us fully on the leaders. “Pericles” has qualities of an odyssey, but it’s also a series of character studies on good and evil kings, and these provide the most exciting performances here. As the incestuous Antiochus, Felix Hayes expertly merges the poetic with the creepy. And as the benevolent Simonides, Christian Patterson makes scene-stealing sense of a character too excited by his matchmaking to stick to a well-meaning but mischievous game plan.
The most obvious alteration here is that Harvey ditches Gower and instead gives the narration to a seemingly neutral figure, Rachelle Diedericks, who later steps into the role of the adult Marina, Pericles and Thaisa’s daughter who is forced into prostitution by pirates, only to, humorously, convince every man who wants to take her virginity that he really, really doesn’t want to do that.
By the time Pericles, Marina and Thaisa (who had been thought dead and tossed overboard in a coffin) reunite at the end, you should plan to have tissues handy. In every production of this show I’ve seen, and with this one, the play has worn you down enough by the end that, like Thaisa, you’re ready to be revived.
I left moved but feeling mixed about this show. It walks a very fine line between the lovingly lyrical and the relentlessly precious. But I also see how that fragile balance is necessary here. Harvey treats the piece not as a play that always involves you — because it can’t — but as a piece of music with high notes and low ones.
Most impressively, she provides a theatrical storytelling quality, a dreamy un-reality, a once-upon-a-time-ness, that makes this jarringly twisty work always about something bigger. We feel from the get-go that “Pericles” is about life itself, how it presents hope, disappoints horribly, randomly undoes human achievements, corrupts the decent, converts the tempted. And, in the magical land of make-believe, even Shakespeare will sometimes give you the weepy happy ending you may be craving.