Pericles, Prince of Tyre by William Shakespeare, directed by Mark Wing-Davey (review)

A theatre’s choice to put on a Shakespeare play is particularly charged. If contending with the Bard’s cultural capital were not enough, centuries of performances—modern and early modern, excellent and dreadful, groundbreaking and forgettable—shadow the contemporary decision to “do Shakespeare.” In Berkeley Rep’s first Shakespeare since 2001, Mark Wing-Davey’s adaptation of Pericles, Prince of Tyregets at the novelty and wonder of experiencing a Shakespeare play, or any play for that matter, for the first time: Wing-Davey’s innovative and dynamic staging, props, direction, and actors revel in pushing the boundaries of the familiar. Rather than straightforwardly honoring the theatrical tradition associated with Shakespeare, his Periclesrepurposes that cultural resonance to its own ends.

Wing-Davey’s Shakespeare is assisted by his choice of play: in terms of the canon, Periclesis less significant because its plot is convoluted, its characters flat and themes moralizing and contrived. Scholars still debate the extent of Shakespeare’s contribution to the play, first performed around 1607, but first printed in 1609 in an edition riddled with defects; most scholars attribute the first nine scenes of the play to George Wilkins and the remaining thirteen to Shakespeare. The play’s form is also unlike any of Shakespeare’s others. Based on John Gower’s fourteenth-century verse narrative Confessio Amantis, Periclesfollows the adventures of its eponymous sovereign on a series of picaresque adventures: he solves riddles, jousts, falls in love, wrecks a few ships, and suffers the loss of his wife. If that were not enough, the play also deals with hunger, incest, prostitution, and apotheosis. Adding to the generic playfulness, Gower himself shows up to serve as chorus. Following Shakespeare’s anachronistic lead, Wing-Davey squeezed in a few more contemporary references to the picaresque, including Batman and Robin, Monty Python, and the film 300.

With so little to hold on to in terms of the performance’s textual unity, Wing-Davey made the most of his choices in musicality and casting to provide grounding. Each actor did double or triple duty as part of the ensemble cast; several also joined in providing the alternatively beachy, bluesy, and “world music” tunes that ran through the entire performance. Before the play proper opened, percussionist Jeff Holland led the cast and audience in singing a round, partly written on the spot with audience participation. Variations on this melody sounded at different times in the performance that followed, most notably during Princess Thaisa’s birthday celebration and then in a minor key at the play’s close. Drawing on the audience’s musical memory in this way provided coherence to the picaresque as it created community in the playhouse.

Riffs on the theme of memory-making and resonance also informed casting choices. Several times, Wing-Davey deployed the same actor in polarized roles. Jessica Kitchens alternatively delighted as the artless Princess Thaisa and glowered as the vengeful Queen Dionyza, a pairing made more sinister as the latter persecutes the former’s innocent daughter. The incestuous King Antiochus bore little resemblance to the jovial King Simonides (Thaisa’s father), but the choice to cast the imposing James Carpenter in both roles was provocative, particularly because the father/daughter theme so preoccupies the play. Such decisions on Wing-Davey’s part involved cutting characters and scenes from the source text; the result, however, was both modern and medieval, reveling in psychological complexity as it made manifest the concern of early English writers (Shakespeare included) with the theme of what constitutes “right rule.”

With all these role-swappings and inversions, the play relied upon the stability of its three central characters: Gower, Pericles, and Marina. Gower, generally a male chorus figure, was played by Wing-Davey’s longtime partner Anita Carey, whose resolute stolidity and northern English accent guided the audience through the convoluted plot. David Barlow’s Pericles crafted a virile vulnerability through scene after scene that compromised his agency. And Annapurna Sriram...