Pericles (RSC at the Roundhouse)
Way up past Camden on the Northern Line is Chalk Farm - the location for the new Roundhouse theatre. There’s not much around here yet - a service station, a couple of low-key pubs and a kebab shop.
The Roundhouse itself is a conversion of a railway turntable building from the 1850s. When I was a kid I remember playing with toy railways, which almost always had a little turntable where the trains can be re-routed onto other tracks. This is the real thing, and its massive. It’s a cylindrical building in the beautiful and ubiquitous London clay bricks, about 200m in diameter, with a high wooden roof held up by massive cast-iron columns.
Built inside this building is a theatre in the round, seating about 1000 people in highly raked seating. Sightlines are excellent, and the initial feel is somewhat like the Globe, but with cushioned seats. Interestingly it doesn’t feel as intimate though.
The play (Pericles) is a late collaboration known from a quarto published shortly after the first performance. It was one of the the most popular plays in its time, but is not greatly performed these days. This is largely because its a spectacle in the physical but not the psychological sense.
There is a bewildering array of locations, incest, about 20 severed heads, no less than three shipwrecks, an abduction by pirates, a scene in a bawdy house, a death, a birth, a resurrection, a famine and a tournament. Not to mention the usual set of mistaken identities and misconceptions.
One of the attractions for the Elizabethans was undoubtedly the oriental settings, and this is nicely evoked in this production. As you enter the entire space is filled with persian style candle lanterns hanging at different levels and giving a wonderful depth to the stage. Unfortunately they lift these up when the play starts, presumably to improve the sightlines, but I think it would be better if they stayed in place.
The costumes are colour coded by location in this production, which helps the audience to work out exactly what is going on. It is still quite tricky to get a feel of the places - the first half of the play is a Cook’s tour of a mythical orient, with no more than a quick sketch of character or place. According to the program, it is felt that this part is not by Shakespeare, or the quarto is a a bad transcription, and it shows. There is more action than act, and this production tries and nearly succeeds in making the spectacle work. The aim is to do something with the feel of Gladiator, not a bad comparison given that a gladitorial contest is key to the story.
The second half is better, even if the story sometimes lurches awkwardly. There is humour, as the heroine of the play, Pericles’ daughter, abducted by pirates and sold into sex slavery, manages to maintain her virginity in a bawdy house by being so pure that her clients are shamed into abstinence. Shakespeare’s presumed collaborator in the play is John Gowes, who owned bawdy houses in Bankside, so this scene has a gritty reality (except of course for her maintained chastity).
The music is worth mentioning. The small orchestra includes several folk instruments of the region, and it is refreshingly gutsy, and adds a lot to the sense of place.
The denoument clears up the many loose threads, and the fact that everyone ends up living happily ever after is the best indication that this is not a genuine Shakespeare play. Not a bad production, and parts are quite fun, but I don’t think it will lead to a revival of the play.