Theatre
The Island Princess (Swan Theatre, Stratford) Pericles (Roundhouse) Life's a Dream (White Bear Theatre, Kennington)
Rivalry in the Orient
Patrick Carnegy
The RSC's season of unfamiliar Jacobean plays continues to pluck pearls from obscurity. The adventures promised in Eastward Ho! (a riotously funny gem of a play by Jonson, Marston and Chapman) reached no further than a capsize off the Isle of Dogs. A landfall in Italy was achieved with Massinger's weirdly wonderful The Roman Actor. John Fletcher's The Island Princess (1621) finally transports us to the exotic Orient of the Moluccas, known to the Jacobeans as the Spice Islands. It may well have been the first play on the English stage to have been set in the East Indies; Gregory Doran's production claims to be the first for 370 years.
The story tells of the efforts by Portuguese adventurers to win the hand of a Moluccan princess, but also encodes the rivalry between the British and the Dutch for the spoils of the Orient. For although the adventurers are all nominally `Portugals', as the text has it, the play is best understood as championing British colonialism. The impulsive new arrival, Armusia, possibly modelled on Sir Francis Drake, carries off the capricious Princess against the impotent blustering of Ruy Dias, whom we must suppose to be Dutch. Halfway through, the comedy suddenly turns serious, voicing fears that the price for the riches of the East may be the surrender of Christianity to what Armusia dismisses as a 'shambles of wild worships'. Thankfully, Fletcher himself remains always the playwright and never the preacher.
Gregory Doran is wise in treating the play as knock-about entertainment, revelling in its opportunities for exotic display. A Balinese gamelan, directed by Adrian Lee, is permanently on-stage, its percussive tintabulations contributing greatly to the many pleasures of the show. But how far to go in finding an Oriental style for the acting? With the male islanders this is taken to the point of wildly inventive parody, especially in Joe Dixon's preposterously funny King of Bakam Ca fellow that farts terror', as an unimpressed bystander observes). But it would have helped if Sasha Behar's Princess had come across as more mysteriously regal and less coquettishly forthright. She has something to learn from her attendants (Shelley Conn and Claire Benedict), both of whom brought a sly sense of Eastern allure to their movements and gestures. David Rintoul's love-sick Ruy Dias expostulates with such magnificent vacuity that you wonder how he's ever reached the Moluccas. Antony Byrne packs energy and credibility into his more worldly wise nephew Pyniero, while Jamie Glover is excellent as Armusia.
Back in London at the Roundhouse, and still in Oriental mood, the RSC completes its season of Shakespeare's late plays with Pericles. This, you'll recall, is the partpageant, part mystery-play in which the blameless Prince of Tyre trawls the Mediterranean in search of a wife, loses her in a double calamity of childbirth and shipwreck, gives out his baby daughter to foster-parents, thinks to have lost her too. and after many a further shipwreck is miraculously reunited with them both. It's a play well suited to the circus-like space of the Roundhouse. Adrian Noble turns it into a souk with the players milling around among the audience to draw you in. It creates a terrific theatrical atmosphere, and if this is part of the RSC's search for new and younger audiences then, to judge by the rapt expressions on the faces of the youthful prommers luxuriating on the kelims around the arena, it's well on the way to success.
The production itself is both spectacular (not least in its aerial acrobatics), and deeply affecting in the great scene when Pericles (Ray Fearon) and Marina (Kananu Kirimi) are restored to each other. But I churlishly venture a caveat. Shakespeare himself asks for much music in the play, and this is well supplied by Shaun Davey. But Noble has allowed Davey to exceed the bardic brief and underlay too much of the action with a sumptuous sonic carpet. Extra songs include a duet for Pericles and Thaisa (Lauren Ward) that hovers uncomfortably close to the alien world of Andrew Lloyd Webber, There's no way that this can be the 'music of the spheres' which Pericles claims he hears. About the petals floating down around Pericles, Marina and Thaisa at the end I say nothing at all. This is, at heart, far too good a staging to be burdened with superfluous sentiment. Away with it!
You wouldn't exactly expect to find a philosophical play from the Spanish Golden Age in a tiny theatre tucked away behind the bar in a Kennington pub. But Player's & Co take the view that if no one else is going to tackle Calderon's Life's a Dream then it has to be them. Maybe Christiane Hille's production does less than justice to the humour with which Calderon balances his profundities, but Peter East
land relishes the Prince's philosophical musings as engagingly as though he were playing Hamlet, a role that surely soon awaits him. Heaven only knows how a show like this — on until 14 July — pays its way, but the adventuresome little theatre is well worth a visit (020 7793 9193). If you want to stay in Spanish mood, the excellent Finca tapas restaurant is nearby.
Previous page
