From no Shakespeare at all in its first two winter seasons, Dominic Dromgoole's
swansong at the Globe is an all-Shakespeare season in the Swanamaker. I hope this
doesn't become the norm, as I liked having the indoor playhouse as a place to
showcase other Jacobean playwrights and works that don't often see the light of day.
Of course, even a Shakespeare play can be pretty obscure, and as the theme of the
season is to play four of the late romances in rep, two of the quartet are rarities.
The reason we seldom see the first is that, apart from the entirely lost plays,
Pericles is the one of which the least has survived. The version we have is
reconstructed from a a dodgy quarto of fragmented scenes, some attributed to
Shakespeare, some to George Wilkins. So it's episodic, inconsistent and full of
bizarre tangents and plot contrivances. But Dromgoole opts to view the problems as
strengths, playing it as a kind of silly alternative to the
Odyssey.
