As far as I’m concerned, The Adventures of Pericles is two hours of terrible playwriting, ending with the touching story of Pericles’s lost daughter, Marina. A younger, cuter, infinitely less interesting version of Odysseus, this Pericles wanders through eight plots, each elaborately introduced by a long-winded narrator named Gower (the name of the earlier poet whose story Shakespeare appropriated and messed with).
Stratford’s current version omits Gower and casts all the women whom Pericles loves and learns from with the same actress, the bewitching Deborah Hay. Evan Buliung’s handsome, heroic Pericles ages startlingly but provides an empathetic, heroic center for the play’s fantastic wanderings through the perils and follies of far-flung civilizations, which include incest, pirates, brothels, burials at sea, drownings, executions, revolutions, resurrections, religious awakenings, and a rediscovered family.
The last scenes of a wasted Pericles resurrected by the miracle of his rediscovered daughter and wife are almost worth sitting through the previous ones. Scholars believe that those last scenes are the only sections written entirely by Shakespeare. Or perhaps they’d just prefer to believe that.
The production is appropriately more suggestive than literal in its sets, props, and costumes. But Kevin Fraser’s lighting effects are startling and very involving. A large, typically masterful Stratford cast, many performing multiple and varied roles, animate each of the eight segments commandingly. And that incredibly versatile, brilliant actor Scott Wentworth again demonstrates his enlightening command of difficult drama as the director of this fanciful dramatic journey.
