Pericles
The Swan Theatre, Stratford-upon-Avon

THIS fairy tale for adults, thought to have been only partially Shakespeare’s work, is relatively rarely produced today on the modern stage. It did not even appear in the First Folio, the Bard’s Bible. Yet it was apparently very popular in its own day.

Tamara Harvey’s new production for the RSC should serve to resurrect its popularity. 

The programme’s introductory essay suggests that the play attempts to explore “what makes an effective leader.” This spanking tale, however, of the Aegean travels and travails of Pericles, Prince of ancient Tyre, on the run from Antiochus, King of Antioch, whose incestuous alliance with his own daughter Pericles has ironically discovered, invites and requires no scholarly analysis. 

The audience are kept too involved with shipwrecks, pirate kidnapping, Pericles’s queen dying in childbirth and miraculously brought back to life, and the surviving daughter, 14 years later, surviving enslavement in a Mytilene brothel by converting the establishment’s clients.

Harvey’s production cleverly changes the text’s narrator from the medieval poet, John Gower, to Marina, Pericles’s lost daughter, so that the play becomes largely her story. This keeps the action moving at pace while Kinnetia Isidore’s beautiful costumes and Claire Van Kampen’s music engage eye and ear throughout.

Annie-Lunnette Deakin-Foster’s choreography, whether the balletic group movement, living images from Greek vases, or the cat’s cradle entanglement of a destructive tempest at sea hold audience attention. 

While Alfred Enoch as Pericles commands the first half and Rachelle Diedericks’ Marina the second, the large supporting cast confidently handle the language of a difficult and what has been called a “patched-up” text (there are numerous echoes of Shakespeare’s better-known works) so that an audience that may at times find exact meaning obscure will never lose the intent.

Shakespeare’s great rival, Ben Jonson, called the play a mouldy tale. Here is a production which turns it into a dreamlike journey through a world which will remind many lucky audience members of the world of childhood. 

It all ends happily, of course. If only! 

Runs until September 21. Box office: 01789 331-111; rsc.org.uk.