The Globe and Mail, June 12, 2003
The Adventures of Pericles
By: Kate Taylor
British director Leon Rubin returns to the Stratford Festival to direct Pericles this year, armed with a big concept -- and metre upon metre of Thai silk.In 2002, Rubin made a valiant if not entirely successful attempt to turn the three parts of Henry VI into something playable. This season he has another tough assignment: One of Shakespeare's late romances, Pericles, Prince of Tyre features a baroque but episodic plot following its hero from one exotic kingdom to another, and such archaic devices as a narrator and dumb shows summarizing the upcoming action. Scholars debate how much of this portmanteau script was actually written by a collaborator, and who that person might have been.
Stratford has breezily renamed the play The Adventures of Pericles, and Rubin, a director with an interest in Asia, has hit upon the idea of setting Pericles's ports of call not along the Mediterranean but across the East. On the stage of the Festival Theatre, designer John Pennoyer, who travelled to Thailand to buy some of the fabric for the costumes, has created a series of hypercolourful, larger-than-life versions of North Africa, Greece, India, Japan, Thailand and Bali.
His designs are occasionally so overblown as to make these places unrecognizable, but it's a powerful idea. If the ancient cities of Tharsus, Ephesus, Pentapolis or Mytilene were distant, exotic places to the Elizabethans, they mean almost nothing to us, while Bombay, Denpasar, Kyoto or Bangkok can play those iconic roles. Sometimes, Rubin's parallels are clever enough that our images of those places can truly amplify the play, as both the poverty and the cultural richness of India can be used to describe the state of Tharsus, a city Pericles rescues from starvation, or the fleshpots of Thailand can provide the setting for the pimps and whores of Mytilene.
Rubin also has a wonderful solution for the narrator, the role for which Shakespeare resurrected the medieval poet Gower to act as his intermediary. Here, actor Thom Marriott, his entire body painted as white as that of a butoh dancer, creates a weirdly eye-catching and slightly mischievous Gower in what turns out to be the best performance of the evening. In another brilliant stroke, Rubin turns one of the several dumb shows into a puppet show with Marriott manipulating two little Thai marionettes representing Pericles and his Queen Thaisa.
But when the great swaths of white parachute silk that cover Gower's stage are magically pulled back to reveal the colourful worlds to which Pericles journeys, the problems in this production begin to emerge. Often the physical staging cannot live up to the promise of exoticism that Rubin and Pennoyer make with the design. For example, when a shipwrecked Pericles wins Thaisa's hand at a tournament, the other contestants are costumed, in purposeful contrast to his poor rags, in elaborate Japanese and Mongolian uniforms and armour. They are impressive if rather overdressed figures, but the little bits of martial choreography they execute to strut their stuff look merely silly and soon dampen the excitement created by their costumes. Similarly, the minor comedy generated in the scene where Pericles's long-lost daughter Marina is sold recalcitrantly into prostitution never lives up to the weird and wonderful costumes of her captors.
The cast were often visibly struggling with those costumes Saturday, an opening night with more minor mishaps -- a stumble on a long gown; a hand that just couldn't find its way out of a wide sleeve -- than I have ever seen in a Stratford production.
If huge efforts have clearly been expended on the execution of Rubin's concept, the delivery of the text has been sadly neglected. This season, with a massive playbill featuring 14 plays and two musicals to mount, Stratford has assembled a large and diverse acting company, some of whose members have little experience performing Shakespeare. The episodic nature of Pericles calls for the bench strength to cover a whole series of secondary characters who dominate one or two scenes and then are gone. This company, a third of whose members are drawn from the cast of a very different beast, the musical The King and I, just doesn't have it.
One is thankful for the proud and well-spoken figures of Stephen Russell and Brigit Wilson as Cleon, the governor of Tharsus, and his wicked wife Dionyza, and for their firm control of their scenes. One only wishes that Karen Ancheta's Thaisa, Charles Azulay's version of her father Simonides, King of Pentapolis, or, in Ephesus, Wayne Sujo's Cerimon shared that ability to drive the meaning of the text rather than simply speak it.
As Marina, Nazneen Contractor starts out strongly as the young woman maintaining her quiet dignity in the face of her trials, but she soon runs out of steam. She proves neither a very effective straight woman to Michael Therriault's rather desperate attempts at comedy in the role of Boult the pimp nor a very moving advocate when she attempts to rouse her grief-stricken father Pericles, with whom she has finally been reunited.
In the title role, Jonathan Goad is proud, generous and virile in youth, and duly sorrowful in the premature old age into which Pericles is plunged by his losses -- and his decision never again to cut his hair nor shave. But if this play is about some kind of emotional journey ending in enlightenment, Goad has little explanation to offer of the character. It's not an easy part; he reminds me of one of those comically truncated characters in 1066 and All That: a good king who travelled too much. Still, if we were to see some impetuousness or lack of judgment in earlier scenes, perhaps we could perceive this character as something more interesting than, as he describes himself, a tennis ball bounced about by the seas.
No doubt this production will become smoother as the actors grow used to those extravagant costumes and get a stronger hold on the lines. But I doubt that a fuller interpretation of the characters is going to magically emerge -- any more than a captivating delivery of a Shakespearean script that is full of wonders but can't simply trade on its familiarity.