Magic, chaos and a cast of hundreds
Pericles National’s Olivier Theatre
Shakespeare’s sprawling epic of adventure, shipwreck, loss and reunion has had a stormy relationship with the National over the years. Assessing the play’s poor box-office prospects in 1988, Peter Hall removed it from his farewell fusillade as artistic director. It was mounted six years later, in the Olivier, by Phyllida Lloyd but achieved a dispiriting 46per cent attendance. The feted Japanese director Yukio Ninagawa dropped by in 2003 with a visually ravishing version – but that was a pop-up
Pericles, here and gone in a jiffy. Now it’s back on the main stage in – once again – a blink-and-you’ll-miss it staging that marks a new voyage into the unknown for the NT – heralding the start of a project called “Public Acts”, “a nationwide initiative to create extraordinary acts of theatre and community”.
This has been inspired by a venture of the same name in New York and has grown out of that exceptional mass participation event in 2016 commemorating the Battle of the Somme, We’re Here Because We’re Here, which saw over a thousand young volunteers take to the streets in military uniform in silent tribute.
Has there ever been a show that involved such a large number of people performing simultaneously on the Olivier stage? Apparently not. Emily Lim’s production boasts a cast of more than 200, drawn from Greater London and representing different backgrounds and age groups.
Simply co-ordinating exits and entrances is a Herculean feat of logistics – and there seem to be enough fancy costumes to kit out Notting Hill Carnival – but the ambition is greater than a dash of decorative milling around. If the brevity of the run implies timidity, overall the creatives, led by playwright Chris Bush and composer Jim Fortune, are throwing caution to the wind.
The amateurs – supplementing a small corpus of professionals – sing, execute choreographed movements, even wow with some acrobatics; an onrush of physicality that doesn’t exclude those in wheelchairs. It’s a grand advertisement for Britain’s melting pot, chiming with the play’s themes of migration and dislocation, of facing threat and finding refuge.
Initially it feels as though we’re being told what to think, but just as these strangers have plainly been galvanised, so a gradual transformative magic works on us too.
Bush, who made waves in April with the surprisingly thoughtful musical The Assassination of Katie Hopkins, takes liberties to trim the action down to 90 minutes. The trajectory is simplified and sharpened to one of snootish individualism humbled and humanised: “I’ll admit that the pastures are pleasant, but the fields are only fit for a peasant,” Ashley Zhangazha’s Prince sings at the start.
The actor anchors the evening in rich emotional truth – after Pericles has lost his wife (Naana Agyeiampadu’s Thaisa) at sea and been told his daughter Marina (Audrey Brisson) is dead, he becomes a palpably different, sweeter man. The music verges on the sublime. We hear Indian drumming, the keening lament of the London Bulgarian choir, a heartpiercing lullaby, uplifting ska and a banging club anthem presided over by the bawd Boult (Kevin Harvey in fab drag) beneath glitter-balls dripping with sea-creature tentacles.
“You are your own way home,” the company calmly reiterate by candlelight, in different languages, at the end. It’s a measure of the journey travelled that what might have sounded too pat at the start has acquired a searing profundity.