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Pericles (Willow Globe) @ Oystermouth Castle

The Willow Globe in Powys, Wales, celebrated its 25th anniversary in 2019, and the coincidence of the British Shakespeare Association holding its first conference in Wales led to a special performance of the company’s Pericles in the grounds of Oystermouth Castle. A more beautiful setting for an outdoor production of Pericles is hard to imagine; the …

Périclès, Prince de Tyr (Cheek by Jowl) @ Les Gémeaux, Sceaux

NB This piece is based on the first two public performance as well as the final two pre-opening rehearsal runs. I am grateful to Cheek by Jowl for so generously allowing me to observe the final stages of preparation. Cheek by Jowl last assayed Pericles in 1984/5 in an acclaimed production that Carole Wood declared …

Pericles (University College Cork/LittleShoes Productions) @ The Unitarian Church, Cork

I spent the first half of last week in Cork for the event ‘Celebrating Shakespeare 400: Performing Pericles, Prince of Tyre’. Part of the extensive Irish Shakespeare festival commemorating the 400 years since Shakespeare’s death, this event was billed as offering what appears to be only the second ever performance of Pericles in Ireland, coupled …

Pericles (Shakespeare’s Globe) @ The Sam Wanamaker Playhouse

Dominic Dromgoole’s tenure as Artistic Director of the Globe is ending, perhaps unsurprisingly, with stagings of four of Shakespeare’s ‘late plays’ as the first full Shakespeare productions in the Sam Wanamaker. Pericles, the first of these, plays to Dromgoole’s strengths: a rousing, varied play with huge shifts in tone, varied environments and a large ensemble …

Pericles (Ketterer’s Men) @ The Shakespeare Institute

For those of us who knew Lizz Ketterer, even partly or briefly, she remains a very present absence three years after her passing. The Trust set up in her memory raises funds to allow one promising young early modernist each year the opportunity to attend the RSC’s summer school; the bench in the garden of …

Pericles (RSC) @ The Swan Theatre

I don’t think I’ve ever known anyone who’s seen ‘Pericles’. It’s debatable, to be honest, whether I know anyone who’s even read it, it only surviving in severely corrupt or conjecturally reconstructed texts. It’s not a play which people seem to know much about (“It’s a Roman one, innit?”) and the theatre tonight, while bustling …