PERICLES (Shakespeare Happy Hours)*****

 

By Megan

Link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9aGXGo3aR08

Available until: Forever, I hope

Pericles is a really difficult play and I’m not sure if I understand it properly yet but I really love it! There are bad things and bad people but then there’s a happy ending and it’s really lovely.

I thought it was quite like a fairy tale. I wasn’t going to write that in case it sounded silly but then one of the actors said that after the show so I don’t feel silly now. Joel Colodner plays Gower who is like a narrator and he tells bits of the story and the way he tells it feels like I’m having a bedtime story and even though bad things happened, every time I saw Gower I felt like everything would be all right in the end.

I noticed something about the play. Apart from the historie,s most Shakespeare plays seem to be set in one place or mostly set in one place but in Pericles there are lots of different locations.  Pericles travels around a lot and meets different people and some of the people he meets come back into the story so the play is kind of jumping around between different places. There are lots of scenes in boats too. The actors said Pericles isn’t performed very often and maybe that is because there would be lots of scene changes and that would be really difficult? A lot of plays keep the same set but maybe they think it would be confusing to do that with Pericles. But I don’t think it would be very confusing because it works really well on Zoom and Gower helps us to know where the characters are.

One thing I really like about this play is that the nice people help other people and then it’s like good karma and people are nice to them too. When Pericles runs away from Tyre he must be frightened and upset but he still helps the people who are having the famine. And then later when Pericles is cold and hungry he meets the fisherman and they look after him. Pericles does have to wait years and years to be happy again after he loses his wife and daughter but he does get to be happy in the end.

Deb Kinghorn is brilliant as Pericles. He is a really kind, confident and clever man. He has lots of adversity but he bounces back from it so many times – until he loses his wife and daughter which is understandably too much for him.

Caroline Cronin plays Thaisa. She is really lovely and she has a very nice smile and I can understand why Pericles wanted to marry her. She is clever too. Her dad Simonides wants to give her away in a jousting competition (I think that kind of thing was very fashionable in the stories Shakespeare used to write his plays) but Thaisa knows Pericles would be the best husband.

Laura Piccoli was good as Marina, you can see she really takes after her parents even though they didn’t bring her up. She is intelligent and good at persuasion just like they are. She probably didn’t have a great life because her adoptive mum didn’t like her and then she got a job in a really bad place but she’s still a really nice person.

There were lots of other really good characters but I especially liked the fishermen. They made me laugh especially Montgomery Sutton cooking spaghetti to eat with the fish. It was nice to have a really funny scene. Dhruv Iyengar seems like another nice man as Lysimachus and Jerome Harmann-Hardiman played about 3 different roles and he made them all really different.

I liked Kathy Somssich who played Dionyza at first and she made me realise that there is one thing you can’t do on Zoom, you can’t hug characters who are crying. But mostly I love Zoom and it seems like a normal way of doing a play now. I didn’t like Dionyza so much later on but it’s interesting how her character changes.

And I really really loved the ending! Everyone was so happy.