Pericles at the RSC’s Swan Theatre – review

When Tamara Harvey decided that Pericles would be the first play she’d direct as the new co-artistic director of the Royal Shakespeare Company, it seemed a shocking choice. After all, scholars agree the play is only half by Shakespeare, with the rest written by the rightfully forgotten George Wilkins. It hasn’t been performed by the RSC for 18 years.

It has a byzantine plot about a prince of Tyre who sails endlessly around the world, suffers innumerable shipwrecks and vanishes from the action for a long period when he seems to lose his mind through grief. It has a body coming back from the dead. It has pirates, incest, murder and a young girl sold into a brothel. It also contains some of the most moving scenes of forgiveness and reconciliation ever written by anybody.

It is, in short, a challenging mess. Yet Harvey’s magical production lets you see both why it was so popular when it first appeared around 1607 – there’s a lot of fun in its multiple incidents – and why it deserves reviving. With grace and control, she makes the case that it is a play about a young man (Pericles) and a young woman (his daughter Marina) finding their way in a world that is full of danger, yet responds to their essential goodness and desire to do the right thing.

The first scenes struggle to find their footing on Jonathan Fensom’s set, strung with taut ropes that are like a lyre (the action is underpinned by haunting music by Claire Van Kampen) and that conjure the many ships on which Pericles voyages. There is just so much happening and so quickly.

But Alfred Enoch’s Pericles engages from the very beginning. He is an actor of remarkable complicit openness, a gentle presence who consistently conveys fleeting thought and feeling by his natural ease and warmth. He draws the audience into his journey and from the moment we arrive at the court of Simonides, played by Christian Patterson with vitality and superb comic timing, the production grips.

Harvey’s masterstroke is to give the lines of Gower – the poet who narrates the action, spanning huge jumps in time and place – to Rachelle Diedericks, who eventually transforms into Pericles’s grown-up daughter Marina. Diedericks also combines a telling clarity with language with a directness of emotional approach, and in making her so central, Harvey ties diffused events together with bonds of silk.

Apart from these two, a versatile company play many parts, flecking each with colour and life, shaping every moment. The narrative is supremely fluid, scenes bleeding into one another and sometimes overlapping, with Annie-Lunnette Deakin-Foster’s stylised choreography creating a dreamlike sense of constant sinuous movement, as the cast dances and forms into tableaux that surround events.

Sometimes, this underpinning is over-emphatic. Yet the overall impact is to reinforce the play’s trajectory towards reconciliation and hope, towards a better world. In particular, Marina’s resistance to her fate, the way her sheer goodness entrances even those who seek to exploit her, comes to symbolise the best of humanity.

Her final reunion with Pericles, at first doubtful and then daring to believe, is extraordinarily moving – all the more so because Harvey allows the sheer incongruity of it to be recognised in the way it is played. It’s humorous as well as touching, full of tentative affection. The final scene when her mother who has been brought back from the dead (a dignified and lovely performance by Leah Haile) joins the party is full of real joy.