THE THEATRE.
" PERICLES " AT THE OLD VIC.
THE Old Vie management is always enterprising. On Monday night they produced the play of Pericles, which has not been acted in London for seventy years. They disposed of any doubts the audience might have brought with them as to the authorship of the play by boldly calling it their twenty- ninth Shakespearean production, _thus dealing shortly enough with Beaumont and Fletcher and other aspirants to the authorship. Whoever the . author may have been, it is a fascinating play, a long, delightful, rambling fairy tale, in which the heroes are endlessly heroic, the virgins unconquerably vir- tuous, and in which the audience is constantly, as Dr. Johnson would call it, " exhilarated " by a storm at sea, a joust, or the marriage of a king's daughter.
Beginning at seven o'clock, the play finished very little before 10.30, in spite of the usual Old Vic promptitude which allowed no waits to break the thread of the story—a slender enough thread. Freshness and simplicity the whole play has, but here and there are scenes and passages which rise to real beauty. For example, the speech in which Pericles laments his wife's unhappy case at the birth of Marina, her "terrible child-bed "— " No fire, no light "—with not the least comfort in her necessity; and lastly her hasty burial beneath the " humming waters." And then, again, some of the love passages between Pericles and Thamia are delightful and very much in the spirit of. Philaster. As for the scenes which an earlier age of critics condemned so strongly as unnecessarily coarse, when poet Marina is captured by pirates and sold into infamy, as they were played by the Old Vic company they were of the greatest value in the play. From being a formal ingenue Marina becomes through them a resolute young woman in whom we can com- pletely believe, and it is our anxiety as to her fate in the den of shame that provides the real thrill of the play. Not that any of it is dull. We did not spend one tedious minute— Gower as Chorus and the play and the dumb-show among them providing a delightful purling river of interest which carried
us sweetly along and banished time with its pleasant flow. It is hard to conceive of a play more agreeable. It has all the advantages of a combination of a cinema play and a fairy tale. Mr. Atkins and the Old Vie company are to be congratulated. I hope next week to give some account of Mr. Bridges-Adams's productions at the Stratford Festival. Tam.
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