| Accomplished and Vivid Shakespeare Production |
Pericles |
| Aberystwyth University, Dept of Theatre Studies , Emily Davies Studio Aberystwyth , January 29, 2010 |
A year ago Richard Cheshire directed an imaginative and irreverent “Volpone.” Ben Jonson had his view on “Pericles”, at the time one of Shakespeare’s most popular plays. In 1631 he complained that this “mouldy” drama was stealing audiences that should have been his. “Volpone” was awash with modernisms. In “Pericles” the celebrations in Tarsus are filmed discreetly with a tiny camera and Ben Buckstone’s joyously mean, estuary-accented Bolt carries an ipod. But otherwise the company, with assistant directors Sarah-Katy Davies and Krishan Parmar, have created a production that gives the tale with its switchback twists and turns a look that is distinctively its own. As the audience enters Joseph Begley’s authoritative narrator Gower lies in a case-cum-coffin beneath a giant piece of fabric that suggests a shroud. (He also doubles as the Knight of Corinth. In this role of display he plants a couple of narcissistic kisses on his biceps.) The company as a whole is given credit for scenography design. The fabric rises and forms into three giant billows above the action. At times it descends to earth to represent the hunger-wracked city of Tarsus and then the storm waves of the Mediterranean. It later sparkles with stars and at the close descends as a shroud again for Gower. In a play where a goddess appears in a dream to solve a plot dilemma it is a device, both clever and simple, that represents the commingling of heaven and earth. In one corner of the square space of the Emily Davies Studio a wide staircase leads to the gallery. When Sophie Jenkins’ regal Thaisa delivers her speech of love she is positioned alone high up, spot-lit beautifully in Emily Mitchell’s lighting design. “I have no life but in his love”, a line reckoned by textual experts to have been lifted straight from George Wilkins’ source novel, is later delivered with the limpidity it asks for. No credit is given to costume but the colour schema follows a black-white dichotomy. In Mytilene the scabrous brothel trio are in black, while the other characters, barefoot often bare-chested, come in the main in cottons of cream or pale khaki. The colour schematic is reinforced in the stage flooring, a blonde strip wood effect. From a cast of sixteen these are just some of the pleasures to had in the acting. If a poet writes a line that is almost all monosyllables his intention is multiple stresses. Thus Timothy J Howe’s Cleon quite correctly gives equal emphases to his line “So sharp (stress) are hunger's (stress) teeth (stress).” The same unrushed precision of speech is given later to another line of monosyllables “Much less in blood than virtue.” The verse of Katie Bottoms’ Helicanus, played unusually as a woman, is crystal clear even when by virtue of the blocking her back is turned to one section of the audience. She also gives by a margin the most spirited dancing. Angus Marshall’s muscular, energy-driven Pericles has to speak even while swinging on a rope. In the key re-uniting scene his lines “This is the rarest dream that e'er dull sleep. Did mock sad fools withal" are moving indeed. Rachel Johns’ music has a drummer, uncredited, to drive the action sequences. A jazzy piano introduces the brothel. On stage January 22rd Peter Karrie compared the flourishing of talent in Aberystwyth 2010 to that of the Liverpool of the 1963 era. That might be a piece of visiting artist over-statement but to be in the Emily Davies studio this week was a near undiluted theatrical pleasure. |
Reviewed by: Adam Somerset |
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