The greatest “recognition” scene in Western literature takes place in Homer’s Odyssey, and occurs between storm-buffeted Odysseus and long-suffering Penelope. Shakespeare’s Pericles, a play with deep Hellenic—and specifically Homeric and Sophoclean—undertones, is its closest rival in the portrayal of recognition, this time between Pericles and his daughter, Marina. This powerful scene, a standout in a play that can appear, at least on stage, disjunctive, is performed with such sensitivity that one might recommend Joseph Haj’s Folger Theatre production on these few minutes alone.
The story of Pericles is, for all its meanderings, relatively straightforward: A prince, alone in this world save two trusted counselors and a faceless kingdom, arrives in Antioch in search of a wife. The king, Antiochus, has a lovely daughter who is prize for any suitor who solves his riddle. The solution contains a terrible truth—the king is sleeping his daughter—which Pericles guesses correctly (to himself). Fearing, again correctly, that the Antiochus suspects he alighted on the answer and wants him dead, Pericles flees. This sets in motion a play that will, at various times, find Pericles saving a town from famine, drowning at sea, washing up on a foreign shore and winning the hand of a new princess, losing his wife during childbirth, abandoning his daughter to the same people who he rescued from starvation (they sell her into sex slavery), and without boring you with even more details, conversing with the goddess Diana in a dream.
The wonder of Pericles lies in its various storylines, each of the threads strong enough to suspend its own dramatic world. But this is also its primary weakness, and modern directors, perhaps sensitive to these pitfalls, tend to avoid it. This is the Folger Theatre’s first production of Pericles, and while the result, overall, has much to offer, aspects of the production are uneven. Haj frequently takes recourse to slapstick theatrics, which may be unavoidable in a play that calls for the brief—and bizarre—inclusion of pirates to keep up plot progression, but can be distracting. But even those aspects of the play that are overemphasized are played so well by the cast that one’s attention lays captivated by the actors to the exclusion of various distractions.
The Folger creative team deserves much of the credit for Pericles’ success. The stripped-down production shifts attention to the actors, while the use of live instruments, played admirably by the performers themselves, enriches the already intimate Folger settings.
In the end, it is Wayne T. Carr’s portrayal of Pericles in his various stages of self-realization that centers the show. Like Oedipus or Job, the prince of Tyre struggles to understand the malignity of fortune in the face of a life lived in a seemingly noble fashion, and Carr, who has an able shift of expression, plays these emotions well. How wise Pericles becomes over time is hard to tell. Shakespeare does not allow us to mark the quality of Pericles’ rule after his reunion with wife and daughter, and so we cannot judge what, if anything, Pericles has learned from his suffering. I suspect this is Shakespeare’s method of pulling us back into the play to pay closer attention those characters that might first have appeared as simply supporting elements, but on further inspection color a play that is less about Pericles himself than the Periclean universe and its implications.
Pericles is playing at the Folger Theatre until December 20.
