Ben Jonson thought Pericles "a mouldy tale", and few have been moved to disagree. But this late romance has its delights. One is the moment at the start of Act Three, when you can actually hear Shakespeare taking over from his unknown collaborator with "The god of this great vast rebuke these surges." Another comes in the vivid realism of the scenes in a Mytilene brothel: "The poor Transylvanian is dead that lay with the little baggage." And a third is the climactic father-daughter reunion between Pericles and Marina, which always moves an audience.
In fact, this is yet another of those once-unloved plays that have been slowly rediscovered. I've seen a half-dozen Royal Shakespeare Company productions, of which those by Ron Daniels (1979) and David Thacker (1989) stand out.
But 2003 was the unofficial year for Pericles, with three productions opened in rapid succession. One, by Cardboard Citizens, was staged in a Southwark warehouse, in London, and turned the play into a study of contemporary asylum seekers. Neil Bartlett produced a fascinating version at the Lyric Hammersmith, in which Will Keen's Pericles was a hospital patient imagining a series of Mediterranean adventures. But the best was a visiting Japanese production by the great Yukio Ninagawa that showed us a shuffling group of war victims recreating an ancient folk tale about death and rebirth.
Two summers ago, I had a good time at Open Air theatre, in Regent's Park, where each year a Shakespeare play is "reimagined for everyone aged six and over". Natalie Abrahami cut the first two acts, focused on the sea storms and gave full value to the verse, as when Gary Milner's Pericles cried, "The seaman's whistle is as a whisper in the ears of death." I was entranced. More importantly, so was my six-year-old grandson, proving that Pericles still has a potent theatrical magic.
• What are your favourite versions of Pericles? Let us know in the comments below
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