<b>THE ADVENTURES OF PERICLES</b> Tom Patterson Theatre/Stratford Festival SpeakupWNY | Buffalo NY and Buffalo News

Stratford Festival
Through September 19
THE ADVENTURES OF PERICLES Tom Patterson Theatre/Stratford Festival

The night I saw Stratford’s production of “The Adventures of Pericles” is an example of the strength of a repertory company.
Evan Buliung was out sick with laryngitis from his lead role as Pericles and that meant the reserves were called in, with Sean Arbuckle moved up from the understudies.
That meant his roles had to be filled from his understudies and down the line.
Still, it worked.
I don’t know if the company had even had a chance to do a rehearsal with the understudies, a standard practice.
The show must go on, something Shakespeare clearly understood and as a part-owner of a theater probably had to deal with an understudy or as the playwright go on himself for more than The Ghost from “Hamlet.”
Here, one of Shakespeare’s most rarely performed plays was filled with people performing out of their regular roles, the roles they have spent months rehearsing and performing.
It’s hard with a play so seldom performed.
It’s not often on stage because it’s generally not considered among Shakespeare’s best, a play filled with extreme coincidences, constant interference by the gods, something which increases as the play goes along, and finally a Greek city-state where the inner circle put up with a king who is practically catatonic with depression from the loss of his wife and hours-old daughter in a violent storm which sinks his ship and doesn’t whack him and appoint a new and functioning king.
Eventually, they are re-discovered and all’s well that ends well.
You might remember some of the plot lines from other and better plays.
The fundamental strengths of the production carry it along, a strong performance from Arbuckle, a wonderful performance from Deborah Hay in a couple roles, strong smaller roles from E.B. Smith as a Mediterranean hitman, Wayne Best in several roles and as King Simonides, Stephen Russell as the Chorus Helicanus and Marion Adler as the goddess Diana.
Plays which center on tragedy and then double-down on it can be wearing on the audience.
It’s little the way the blood and death of “The Iliad” can get a little hard to take the next time some horrible death occurs and the war rolls on.
And, those events aren’t far away from the cities and waters in which “Pericles” takes place.
You just have to let the story roll along and swim toward its end.
It’s all Shakespeare’s use of mystic, mythological times to tell some of the stories of the violent political and dynastic events of his lifetime, as the royal family and the great nobles struggled for power and for control of the Church.
I think designer Patrick Clark got into that by using costumes for Diana and her acolytes which look like costumes used by nuns for centuries, as they interfere in the events to protect characters they like, for example Pericles’ daughter Marina (Hay), from the brothel keepers in Mytilene.
If you think of this more of some short-term TV soap opera, it all makes perfect sense, the prince who discovers the incest in another royal family and flees, his very short-term wooing of the daughter of another king and a violent and deadly storm out of the Weather Channel (You can just picture Jim Cantore on shore as the few survivors reach land).
Even if this isn’t Shakespeare’s best (and it isn’t), it’s worth seeing for some strong performance (eventually with Buliung) and for the way some truly slimy characters get theirs in a way many in Shakespeare’s audience would have like to have happened to their own, like “I Vespri Siciliani” had to be changed away from the death of the king of Sicily because the kings and other kinds didn't like the idea.
Besides, it might be a long time before “Pericles” is back on stage, even in Stratford.
Director Scott Wentworth does a skillful job of never letting the events slow in the confined space of the Tom Patterson Theatre and stretching your suspension of disbelief.
Stratford does lesser Shakespeare the way the Shaw Festival does lesser George Bernard Shaw and that’s a good thing.
So, erase “The Adventures of Pericles” from your to-do list and see it.

A.W.