Pericles, Prince of Tyre

Pericles has more drama and events packed into it than any other Shakespeare play. Some have described it as a failed epic; I prefer to think of it more as an Odyssey- after all, it is set in Ancient Greece and the episodic nature is much in the vein of that storytelling.

The play has a shocking opening. Pericles, Prince of Tyre,(Mike Gwilym)comes to woo King Antiochus' daughter. All her potential suitors must solve a riddle if they are to marry her and many have died at the attempt. Pericles guesses correctly but wishes he hadn't: the king and the daughter have an incestuous relationship. Tortured by the information, he goes on the run, but during a shipwreck he is washed upon a strange island in only his pants. Pericles encounters many more struggles along the way as he desperately tries to build a life like his former. His lost daughter Marina (Amanda Redman) also faces her struggles as she is captured and placed in a brothel. Can Pericles hope for a miracle and find her again? I've cut out some bits in my summary because I don't want to spoil the suspense. Sitting there watching it, you're sure that things can't get any worse for Pericles and then Shaky and co. (more on that in the final paragraph) hits you with another bit of drama. You completely have to suspend disbelief with Pericles but not in the way that you have to do in some of Shaky's more famous plays when he forces contrivances. The play has fairytale-like qualities as miracles occur and you desperately cross your fingers hoping that Pericles will be rewarded for his virtues. The narrator Gower is constantly telling us to suspend our disbelief and use our imaginations and if you do this, the low-budget set becomes islands, palaces, and brothels.

There is some comedy in the play. The man-and-wife brothel owners are hilariously grotesque- a bit like M. and Mme Thenardier in Les Miserables. Marina is a beautiful piece of goods but she refuses to give up her virginity. To make matters worse, she converts the men that come to see her so they never go back to the brothel again.

As for the playing, well it's hard to compare because you will never see Pericles performed again in your lifetime. It's a play that doesn't work as well on paper as some of the other plays do but comes to life beautifully in performance. Gwilym is a tortured but tough Pericles, taking the blows life deals him with strong virtue and courage. He speaks the lines nicely and very naturally, so we get the full meaning. Juliet Stevenson is lovely as Pericles' wife Thaisa and Patrick Allen as her father is jokey and doting; a complete contrast to John Woodvine's suitably creepy Antiochus. Amanda Redman (the lead in Silent Witness until the current trio took over and ex-head of Waterloo Road) is a charming virtuous Marina, showing the same strength as her father. We have some familiar faces from the BBC Shakespeare series: Clive Swift (from Henry IV) plays an apothecary and Patrick Ryecart (Romeo in the BBC Romeo and Juliet) plays Marina's suitor. Annette Crosbie makes a brief appearance as Marina's wicked adopted mother.

So, what's all this about Shaky and co? Well, Pericles is part of the Shakespeare Apocrypha: plays that are thought to be collaborations with Shakespeare. It's thought that Shaky wrote just over half of the play, probably the latter half, and the other half was done by some hack. Unfortunately this means that any discussion of the play has to mention the authorship issue, making people think that the play isn't "proper Shakespeare". It's as if your husband's cheated on you with some hussy. For my part, the play's episodic nature could indicate that it was a collaboration but I think it was one in which Shakespeare had the upper hand.

Despite all the fuss about the authors, Pericles is a very Shakespearean play. The father-daughter relationship is a recurring theme in Shakespeare and in this play, we get three strong but very different father-daughter relationships. It contains the miracle that categorises it amongst Shakespeare's romances and is similar in character to The Winter's Tale. Tempests, as in many Shakespeare plays, feature heavily here in a literal and symbolic sense. And it's got the low-life characters of brothels that we see in Jacobean Shakespeare. Even if Shaky didn't write all of it, this is Pure Shakespeare.

'Pericles, Prince of Tyre' is one of Shakespeare's last plays and also one of his least famous, more with it to do in my mind that it is problematic to stage. Although the play is nowhere near top-tier Shakespeare, with a story that can be sprawling and over-plotted and the second half is better than the first, do feel personally that it is deserving of a better reputation. It does have a lot of interesting elements and characters and their relationships, and the text and themes are distinctive Shakespeare.

Found this production of 'Pericles, Prince of Tyre' to be very, very good. For me it is among the better productions of the inconsistent (some productions being better than others) but absolutely fascinating BBC Television Shakespeare series, because some of the elements are given some of the best execution of them here of the series. Have found it interesting that in the BBC Television Shakespeare series the productions for some of the lesser known plays are actually better than the productions of some of Shakespeare's most famous plays. Am being serious when saying this. It more than makes do as the to date only production available on DVD.

There is more that is done right than is done wrong in this production, though it takes a little time to get going which is partly down to the play itself.

Visually, 'Pericles, Prince of Tyre' is one of the best-looking of the BBC Television Shakespeare series. Budget limitations did tend to show in the series, even in a few of the best productions, so they looked a bit dreary (very in the case of particularly 'The Tempest' and 'A Midsummer Night's Dream'). The production values may not be quite as interesting as those of a few of the Elijah Moshinsky-directed productions, but they do look absolutely beautiful still, there is a sense of time and place and clearly a lot of effort went into them. Especially the sets and lighting. Loved the music score too, which is up there as among the series' best. It fits the setting and adds a lot and never distracts. It is also a lovely score in its own right.

Shakespeare's text cannot be faulted as usual, while the production does a great job overcoming the play's staging problems like the bigger set pieces (not making them cheap or static) and making the time gap cohesive and believable. Also doing well in giving the story momentum, not easy for a story as sprawling as the one 'Pericles, Prince of Tyre' has, and cohesion, did find myself understanding what was going on which must not have been easy but was done well. The character relationships brought out the right amount of tension and emotional impact and the recognition scene is touching. This is very thoughtful and moving staging in my view.

Also thought highly of the cast. Edward Petherbridge occasionally overdoes it as Gower, but mostly he was fine and did well moving the story forward. Mike Gwilym is a haunted but also very human Pericles, while Juliet Stevenson brings subtle dignity to Thaisa and Amanda Redman radiates in charm as Marina. Annette Crosbie is memorably fiendish in a small role. Everybody does well here.

Concluding, very, very good with a lot of great things. One of the best of the series. 9/10

One of the great theatrical experiences of my life was the production of Pericles, directed by Toby Robertson for the Jean Cocteau Repertory in New York City. It won the OBIE for 1981. It was fast paced; the actors enunciated and understood what the lines meant. In contrast, the BBC production drags, and the actors garble the lines. Almost all of the dialogue in Pericles is in poetry -- pentameter. A few of the minor actors did a good job, but most of them broke up the lines and attempted to substitute emotion for meaning. They would speak in a low voice, then yell, then sob, all the while making facial expressions only vaguely related to what they were trying to say. They were trying to ACT, when they should have been trying, above all, to speak their lines effectively. One of the great "recognition" scenes in Shakespeare is that between Pericles and Marina, where he questions her and realizes that she is his daughter, whom he had long thought was dead. In the Jean Cocteau Repertory production, Pericles and Marina were standing, facing each other. They delivered their lines simply and clearly. The effect was shattering. Everyone in the audience, including me, was in tears. In the BBC production, Pericles's face is covered with tears, and he is almost out-of-control with emotion, before he even gets into the dialogue. His words can hardly be understood. Marina is weak. The whole episode falls flat. Pericles is very different from all of the other Shakespeare plays, but it is a great play if directed incisively, with actors who can do justice to the words. I enjoyed seeing Pericles again, but it could have been much better.

Thanks to computer faults I lost my review and now have to try to rewrite it. Mike Gwilym gives a great performance in the role of 'Pericles'. Young, sexy, and full of the risk of dangerous adventure, he almost leaps through the role. I will not spoil the plot which is not as confusing as some people think it is, and really I do not particularly care which parts Shakespeare wrote or not. It begins with incest, and the subject probably was not as shocking in Jacobean times as it is now, and because of that, and some quite beautiful erotic moments like the marriage of Pericles and Thaisa, which ends with the command of her father 'get you to bed' and adult scenes, British certification has given it an absurd 12 certificate. Juliet Stevenson is equally superb in the role of Thaisa, and her 'return' to life is in the same magic mould as 'The Winter's Tale', and what with the great shipwreck scene, it is in the same territory as 'The Tempest', and I cannot fault this filmed production from 1984. I lost my first draft of this review due to an internet failure and cannot recall everything I wrote, suffice to say, this is, in my opinion, one of the best of the BBC's productions of Shakespeare's plays. I loved every moment of its adventures, losses, and those lost re-found. It is late Shakespeare to the core.

This play is a sprawling epic, with just about every plot device in the writer's manual to justify a thick paperback for airplane or beach reading, or an overheated TV miniseries - lovers parted for over a decade, storms at sea, multiple shipwrecks, a virgin menaced in a whorehouse, a homicidal step-mother, a contract killing, characters who return from the dead, a kidnapping by pirates, incest, portentous dream figures, chaste priestesses and goodness knows what else.

What you don't want is for all this voluptuous over-plotting to get bogged down. And that's precisely what happens here.

It's possible the text could have withstood another round of pruning. It's certain that what is performed here would have benefited from a stronger sense of pace.

The actors themselves are almost uniformly excellent. Amanda Redman as Miranda is superlative, and Juliet Stevenson as Thaisa surprises with a soft, romantic radiance absent from her later gallery of grotesque comic roles (and she dances sexy, too). The supporting cast does not disappoint.

Don Taylor's production design is quite striking, and Martin Best's musical score is among the best in the series.

The villains, however, are three. Mike Gwilym who normally recites Shakespeare about as well as anybody, and excels as Berowne in "Love's Labour's Lost" and Aufidius in "Coriolanus," fumbles this assignment. His Pericles is small, self-involved, under-energized and under-vocalized. Often his voice extends no further than the tip of his nose, and even in tight closeup, we need more.

Likewise Edward Petherbridge, memorable for his Newman Noggs in "Nicholas Nickleby," is downright annoying as a lethargic Gower, who materializes periodically to offer leaden apologies for the length of the story (in a most peculiar accent), and hints at all the stuff that got left out, for which we are truly thankful, amen. This Chorus figure does not energize the audience, but narcotizes it further.

I am inclined to blame the faults of these first two miscreants on the third, the director, David Hugh Jones. There is no discernible shape or pulse here at all, and the result is a lumpy, endless mess. With this overabundance of raw material, one wants a firm directorial hand and a vigorous sense of story-telling, and one doesn't get them.

It looks great, sounds good, and may even produce a tear at the final fadeout, Shakespeare being Shakespeare, but it is not a performance. That's a shame, because when will we see somebody else take a shot at it on TV?