Theatre review: Pericles(RSC/Swan & Chicago Shakespeare Theater)

The new RSC team's first season ends with half an Artistic Director finally making a debut as unlikely and understated as the rest of the summer run has been: One of the most obscure plays to just about scrape into the canon, the one Shakespeare himself was so invested in he entrusted half the writing to some pimp he met down the pub. Tamara Harvey hasn't directed at the RSC before, so starting in the smaller Swan also seems a sensibly measured way of getting used to the company's deep thrust stages. In context though there is something audacious about the choice of Pericles as her opening salvo - a play perceived as so unpopular that both her predecessors dealt with it by announcing they were going to stage it, then hoping nobody would notice when they didn't. In this meandering late romance Pericles, Prince of Tyre (Startled Giraffe Alfred Enoch) sets out on a variety of fairytale quests to win princesses with, it's probably fair to say, varying results.

First up is a riddle he must solve to win the hand of Antiochus' (Felix Hayes) daughter (Chyna-Rose Frederick,) or die if he fails. The riddle is, with honestly not even that much paraphrasing, "I, the Princess, am fucking my dad, the King, any questions?" and so far nobody's managed to work out what it could possibly mean*.

Pericles somehow manages to piece the clues together and realises he's in danger, so decides to stay safe by bravely running away, abandoning his kingdom until the situation conveniently resolves itself offstage (the ex machina was too expensive so we just get told about the deus.) Unfortunately his travels result in as many shipwrecks as they do loved ones dying then deciding they actually feel all right after all. Also there's pirates.

Harvey's approach is to play it pretty much straight, and the results are generally decent, although my personal taste would always be to take more of a tongue-in-cheek approach to the overall ridiculousness - the text we have is famously cobbled together out of fragments, and there's a lot of florid, convoluted narration to tell rather than show the story. The simple fairytale approach also means Kinnetia Isidore's costumes all go for a general Middle-Eastern look, and it felt like a missed opportunity to give each of Pericles' many stops it's own visual identity.

The energy does start to pick up after the first shipwreck, and Pericles' more successful wooing of Thaisa (Leah Haile.) Christian Patterson steals this section as her rambunctious father Simonides, who good-naturedly pretends to object to the match to the couple's faces, all the while confiding in the audience how thrilled he is with it. Later there's some striking designs from Jonathan Fensom in the scene where Thaisa is raised from the dead by Cerimon (Jacqueline Boatswain,) who is then somehow not burned as a witch.

Again there's that fairytale quality to the way Rachelle Diedericks' narrator is revealed as Pericles and Thaisa's daughter Marina, the story essentially turning out to be her telling her own origin (complete with the aforementioned pirates abducting her in the middle of an unrelated scene.) I'd like to say Harvey's taken a little-regarded Shakespeare and made sparks fly, but that's not quite what we get. We do, though, get a shaggy dog story that comes comparatively close to making narrative sense, and an argument that maybe the RSC can gamble on this one a bit more than once every 20 years. Maybe once every 10. Fine, 15 then.

Pericles by William Shakespeare and George Wilkins is booking until the 21st of September at the Swan Theatre, Stratford-upon-Avon; then from the 20th of October to the 7th of December at Chicago Shakespeare Theater's Courtyard Theater.

Running time: 2 hours 40 minutes including interval.

Photo credit: Johan Persson.

*my personal headcanon is that yes, of course everyone solves it, and then gets immediately murdered for it like Pericles was going to be