For nearly 400 years now, Pericles, Prince of Tyre has been better known as " Pericles, Play by Shakespeare? " This romance of the high seas (it starts at Antioch and goes all over the Eastern Mediterranean before winding up in Ephesus) probably first hit the London stage in 1607 or 1608. A quarto volume, The Play of Pericles: Prince of Tyre, &c., appeared in 1609, attributed to William Shakespeare. The play was not, however, included in the First Folio of 1623. It may be that Heminge and Condell had doubts about the authorship: the first two acts of the quarto text (which is the only text we have) are either very corrupt or the work of a very mediocre dramatist. Yet this story of spiritual renewal in which Pericles (no relation to the fifth-century Athenian ruler) loses his home, his wife, and his daughter before finding them again inspired T.S. Eliot to write one of his most beautiful lyrics, " Marina. "
The play hasn’t had a major production in Boston since Peter Sellars’s 1983 staging. But the production directed by Andrei Serban that will open at the American Repertory Theatre next Saturday is part of a Pericles boom, as ART associate artistic director Gideon Lester explains. " Yukio Ninagawa just had an unbelievable runaway success with a Japanese-language production that he brought to the Royal National Theatre in London; critics who had spent their whole life seeing Shakespeare said that this was the single greatest single piece of Shakespeare they had ever seen, and the greatest thing the National Theatre had ever done. Other productions are taking place all over the world, and almost every Shakespeare festival across the country is staging it right now.
" And the question is why, and it’s not a question that I have a really satisfactory answer for, though Andrei, I think, feels that it’s because this is a profoundly optimistic play, a play about redemption and about the possibility of overcoming violence and corruption and decay and moving to a state of moral and romantic and spiritual and psychic purity. It’s a very healing play, in his mind, and he thinks that’s why at a time when the world is going through a period of great anxiety and unease, everybody’s turning to it now. "
So did Shakespeare write the play — and does it matter? " If you’re mounting it, it almost doesn’t matter, because the text is the text, and we have to deal with what’s in front of us. I think there’s no question that he wrote the final two-thirds of it, and I change my mind every day about the first third. There are moments of extraordinary beauty, but there’s a kind of dramaturgical chaos which doesn’t always feel Shakespearean. If it is, then the text that’s come to us is fairly corrupt. Andrei says that he likes to think of the play as having been begun by somebody else, and then Shakespeare came in as a favor and then became very interested in pursuing this as a kind of experiment. "
Lester adds that Serban’s production will also be a kind of experiment. " We were quite surprised when Andrei said that he was interested in working with video for this production, because it’s something that he’s never been interested in at all. But he saw two or three artists and theater groups using video recently and became very interested in it as a poetic medium. We filmed the dumb shows last Friday on Crane Beach, on a freezing day. We shipped up part of our props department and built a costume booth and provided food for the actors and did a location shoot. And Andrei himself appears in the film as the messenger figures, I haven’t seen the rushes, so I have no idea what these things are going to look like. " Well, Pericles is a road play, so it’s appropriate that the ART should hit the road to mount it. Next stop, Pericles: The Movie?
The American Repertory Theatre presents Pericles at the Loeb Drama Center, 64 Brattle Street in Harvard Square, in repertory from May 10 through June 27. Tickets are $34 to $68; call (617) 547-8300 or visit www.amrep.org.
