Pericles

This entry could be called ‘In Praise of Shakespeare’ but alas, circumstances means it’s about Pericles.  I am lighting designer on a (very small) production of Pericles being put on at RADA by the exchange students from the NYU who’ve come over for 8 weeks of how-to-do-Shakespeare, culminating in a performance.  I nagged and nagged and wheedled and generally blew a lot of karma to get lighting designer for this show, because while I knew it was small, I also had a few lingering recollections of there being shipwrecks, thunderstorms, temples, palaces and brothels, all of which are more interesting that your middle-class-sitting-room-in-Hampstead-on-a-summer’s-day lighting designer’s fare, and lo, here I am.

I like this Shakespeare dude.  The guy has got something, and there have been many, many productions of Shakespeare where I have caught myself forgetting to breathe.  Why do so few playwrights put ‘Battle’ in as stage directions these days?  The technology has surely improved since 1595, come on guys, a bit of a battle, a bit of a ghost, the odd sword fight, betrayal, death, the torment of the mind, the anguish of the soul, blood, torment, violence, slapdash and a bit in rhyming couplets about seeking after a beautiful yet unobtainable woman, what’s not to love? I have a friend in Saudi Arabia who is planning to teach Macbeth on the basis that it still one of the most exciting bits of drama ever to abuse the Scottish accent; I nearly fell off my chair at the end of a performance of Henry IV (a king who, according to 1066 And All That, wisely resigned half way through his reign in favour of Henry IV Pt 2… nerdy joke, sorry…) and will always remember being forced to stand at gunpoint in a production of Richard II in honour of Bolingbroke’s victory.

Then again… Pericles is what the Reduced Shakespeare Company once lovingly tagged an ‘obscure’ or ‘lesser’ or simply a ‘bad’ bit of work.  It’s not that bad!  I’ve seen some rubbish stuff – hell, I’ve even contributed my time and torchlight to many, many a bad bit of theatre, and Pericles is doing well by comparison.  But neither is it the kind of thing you find being regularly trotted out for the audience to sing along with.  For those who haven’t had the Pericles experience… in brief it’s the story of a king who sets forth to marry a woman, discovers through means of a riddle said woman is sleeping with her father, runs away from both of the above, gets shipwrecked, meets the real woman of his dreams, marries her, has a baby, gets shipwrecked, abandons (presumed but not actually) dead wife, abandons daughter, sails away to feel miserable.  Daughter grows up to be sexy beautiful and wise, at which point surrogate mother decides to kill her; daughter is saved from said fate by being kidnapped by pirates, ends up in a brothel where by means of her virtues turns all the men from sin and is generally virginal and pure.  Meanwhile, Pericles sets forth once more, is told daughter is dead, gets… you guessed it… shipwrecked again, conveniently at the same place where daughter is living, and is reunited, hurrah.  If you think this is a happy ending oh no… because then the goddess Diana appears (and is lovingly lit, in case you’re wondering) and tells Pericles to go to her temple where lo and behold, he meets the wife he thought was dead and mother, daughter and child are all happily reunited hurrah.  Oh yes… and the incestuous king and daughter we met in Act 1, Scene 1, spontaneously combust off-stage.  I kid you not.

Pericles is, in short, one of those plays where the director really, really needs an interpretation.  I’m all in favour of directors doing crazy shit to plays, if the writing is not up to the job… although that said, I’m really really not in favour of the writing not being up to the job, and fail to this day to understand why so much of it isn’t.  Ask me the day after I graduate from RADA for further thoughts on this delicate topic…

As a result of all this, our production of Pericles is having interesting things done to it.  The staging is interesting, there’s dancing, there’s singing, there’s interludes, there’s a strobe bigger than my head suspended in the lighting rig for those pesky difficult moments, there’s choruses being all choral and stuff, it is, all things considered, taking a bit of a hammering and this may not be any bad thing.  The actors are, obviously, all American.  My greatest fear, I must admit, was that these poor American exchange students would get into rehearsal and be forced to drop their American accents, at which point I might have cried.  I am all in favour of people reading stuff in their native accent, since not only does it usually sound grand, it will invariably sound better than people reading stuff in a forced and entirely fake upper-class English one.  Thankfully, sense has prevailed, and our production of Pericles, set in the original locations, will be performed in perfect New Yorker accents!  Thank god.

From a lighting design point of view, it turns out that this production is more than a bit of a headache, as our turn-around time between the first read through and the actual rig was 48 hours.  I am, therefore, flagrantly, shamelessly and with every certainty of having to move stuff later, guessing entirely at what my lighting needs are going to be, throwing up as much of the most flexible equipment with the most adaptable colours as I can get my grubby mits on, as quickly as I can.

Will it work?

… watch this space…