Pericles - Sam Wanamaker Playhouse

Scene of a Shipwreck

Shipwrecks and pirates and brothels, oh my! If Bar Mitzvah Boy suffered from too little plot, Pericles suffered from too much. No sooner did the titular Pericles, Prince of Tyre, set foot on a ship than a storm began a-brewing and he ended up stranded and friendless on foreign shores. The shipwrecks and coincidences and comings back from the dead and Marina's ability to talk herself out of ANYTHING might have made this play farcical and Comedy of Errors-esque, but it had such a strong fairytale quality and atmosphere it was easy to suspend disbelief and take it seriously. I felt that one wasn't supposed to see it as taking place in this world, but in a mystical, magical, ancient otherworld. Having never seen Pericles before but knowing it wasn't an oft-performed play, I was apprehensive. But I found this production beautiful and moving.

The Sam Wanamaker Playhouse may have an irritating name (must everything at the Globe be a paean to Sam Wanamaker?) but it's a wonderful, unique theatre and I would thoroughly recommend seeing a performance there. Each time I've gone I've left feeling as though I've just had a vivid, intense, amazing dream. Because it's so small it's easy to forget about the other members of the audience and absorb yourself fully in the play. And the candlelight! It's always used to good, dramatic effect and, again, it somehow helps you feel as though you're the only person in the audience.

Pericles started off a bit weirdly, with Pericles (played by Globe stalwart James Garnon) leaving town on discovering an incestuous relationship between the woman he plans to marry and her father. It was weird because you assumed that this elaborately set-up plotline would go somewhere (e.g. that the woman would materialise later in the play at an inopportune moment), but it didn't. However, I appreciated the randomness of it.

My favourite scene had to be Pericles' first meeting with the woman he would marry, Thaisa (Dorothea Myer-Bennett). It's Thaisa's birthday and a party is held in her honour, to which various knights are invited (and which Pericles gatecrashes). It's all very festive and they play a game where Thaisa has to guess the Latin mottoes inscribed on the backs of the knights' shields. Entertaining. Original. The bedraggled, recently-shipwrecked Pericles doesn't have a shield but gives her a branch instead. And there is a dance! Excellent. THIS was when I was expecting the incestuous woman to turn up.

I loved the character of Marina (Jessica Baglow), a young woman of great integrity, who managed, with words alone, to get herself out of every single undesirable situation. And she faced many such a situation, from an evil adoptive mother to pirates to brothel-keepers. The scene in which she was reunited with her long-lost father, Pericles was genuinely touching. The subsequent appearance, from the rafters, of none other than the goddess Diana, in Pericles' dream, was the crowning moment in the play. 

photo credit: Scene of a Shipwreck via photopin (license)

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