The Adventures of Pericles
2016: Barry Avrich

This is a product of the Canadian Stratford Festival, and is a live performance (or collection of performances) filmed in front of an audience. Like most of the Stratford productions, it manages to take the play seriously and to treat it with respect, without becoming plodding or pedantic. Much of it is played in something like nineteenth-century dress, which is odd, but the play itself doesn’t firmly require any particular time and setting.

There are a few significant deviations from the original play. Chief among them is the fact that the role of Gower is omitted, and its essentials are taken over by other quasi-choral characters, who supply essential transitional information in song. The Stratford Festival is far from slavishly adhering to the letter of its source, but it does uphold its spirit and its narrative intention better, to my way of thinking, than many another production. The excision of Gower’ part smooths off one of the rougher features of the play.

Intriguingly, the three most important women in the play — Antiochus’s unnamed daughter, Pericles’s wife Thaisa, and their daughter Marina — are all played by the magnificent Deborah Hay, who has also figured in other Stratford productions (taking as well the role of Katherina in The Taming of the Shrew). As Antiochus’s daughter she espresses the pain of a traumatized and broken woman, incapable of getting out of an intolerable situation; as Thaisa she is genuine and warm, capable of seeing beyond the obvious when others around her cannot; as Marina she is a curious mixture of the simple and the complex. Her part is given some song, and she carries it off well. (The older Thaisa at the end is played by a different actress.)

The rest of the parts are carried off equally well. It’s a play with a very large number of speaking parts, and many of them are typically doubled or tripled up save in the largest companies, but the duplication is not of a sort that interferes with the presentation.

There aren’s a lot of choices when it comes to seeing this play in a video version, and this is a very happy addition to the meager lineup. The BBC version is showing its age, though it still bears up quite well, I think. Ideally, one should see both of them.

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