Trevor Nunn directs Shakespeare's 'Pericles'

Part of the issue with Pericles (its hero no relation to the Athenian leader of the fifth century BCE) is that it is a co-authored work. This was a common practice in Shakespeare’s time, sometimes acknowledged and sometimes not. Shakespeare’s collaborator was probably one George Wilkins, a reputed brothel-keeper on the side, who is generally credited with most of the first two acts of the play, with Shakespeare composing the last three. The language does quicken as the play progresses, and it is hard to imagine anyone but Shakespeare conjuring such an image as “Patience gazing on kings’ graves” (v.i.140). We like our Shakespeare pure, of course, or as pure as the notoriously difficult textual issues permit us, but we can’t ignore nearly 1400 lines that he wrote, not to mention what he may have silently doctored.

Trevor Nunn, who has staged his production of the play for the Theatre for a New Audience at Brooklyn’s new Polonsky Shakespeare Center, is the foremost Shakespeare director of his generation, and, like most, he has added his own pruning to the text. It’s an event in more ways than one, since the British-born Nunn, who has directed everything from Cats to All That Fall on Broadway, has never before mounted an original Shakespeare production in the United States.

The nature of fate

Nunn sees Pericles as pivotal in moving from the bleak vision of the tragedies to the more hopeful one of the romance period, but mortals remain in the grip of sporting gods (not to mention human villains) nonetheless. The romance hero, moreover, unlike the tragic one, does not participate in his fate through a tragic flaw — Othello’s jealousy, Hamlet’s indecision — but suffers it by circumstance. Pericles is by all appearances a good ruler of his native Tyre, and a clever suitor for the hand of King Antiochus’s famously beautiful daughter; he eludes the king’s wrath when he discovers that father and daughter are engaged in incest. He generously relieves the starving city of Tarsus from his own store and wins the hand of the princess, Thaisa, of yet another polity, Pentapolis. In all of this, fortune seems to smile on him.

But he first narrowly survives shipwreck and then, as it appears, loses both wife and daughter, the former at sea and the latter from treachery. Things are even worse than they seem, for Pericles’s daughter, Marina, having survived her would-be assassin is sold into a brothel by pirates. Marina’s steadfast virtue, however, thwarts her new patrons, and in the end, the long-grieving Pericles discovers both wife and daughter miraculously saved and intact, and he ends happily reunited with both.

In short, it’s an adventure tale, updated from ancient legend and in its turn the precursor of the picaresque novel and today’s action films: the hero is put to tests, which he survives only to face further ones until he earns his bye. The bye is what is absent in King Lear, whose protagonist suffers bottomless and unending grief until death releases him — unless, as Hamlet suggests, the afterlife is only another stage for suffering.

A post-Lear hero

The rule in romance is, then, that the hero wins through in the end, his pains cancelled by a happy or at least peaceful ending. Of course, there is no guarantee that further challenges do not lie ahead, which is what spawns sequels, but the compact between genre and spectator is that no blow fells the hero for good. Still, the author who finished this play had just come off King Lear, and his new hero, aged beyond his years, immured in the solitude of a grief displayed by the hair and beard that, hermitlike, he refuses to cut, looks every bit a man broken by tragedy when we meet him in Act V, and the surprise we share with him when it all comes “right” in the end carries an unexpected emotional wallop. It is one thing to live happily ever after, and another to be offered that happiness when so much of life and its irreplaceable joys have been cut off. Think of the death row prisoner freed after decades by a DNA test.

Nunn utilizes a large, bare in-the-round space to conduct the play’s brisk action, with a large semicircular wall space depicting the shipwreck scenes with lighting and fabric. The able cast is headed by Christian Camargo as Pericles. Lilly Englert makes a resourceful as well as virtuous Marina, and Patrice Johnson Chevannes as the brothel madam convinces us that Shakespeare probably never had more fun in his life than writing her scenes. Marina and the madam are polar opposites of a sort, but neither has a wicked bone, while Dionyza (Nina Hellman), the Queen of Tarsus who plots Marina’s death, puts Lady Macbeth to shame for sheer villainy. One might say that the female characters in Pericles carry the real dramatic interest; certainly, they display the full human range.

I don’t know that I’d agree with Nunn’s comment that Pericles “had an enormous career-changing effect on [Shakespeare’s] output for the rest of his writing lifetime.” But his casual collaboration with a minor playwright did perhaps lead him to investigate the form of the romance, whose very openness prompted the interesting experimentation of his last works. New wine sometimes does go into old bottles.