[In the following excerpted review of the Royal Shakespeare Company production of Pericles, directed by Adrian Noble, Potter praises both the cast and the production's visual and musical splendor.]

Eminent theatre directors who turn from Shakespeare to musical comedy, like Trevor Nunn and Adrian Noble, have an obvious precedent in Shakespeare himself. Pericles was a famous crowd-pleaser in its own time: scholars and directors, baffled by its uneven, possibly collaborative, text, have usually concentrated on the themes that it shares with other “late plays”—suffering, loss and reunion—and on the tense poetry of the hero's farewell to his dead wife, about to be buried at sea, or his tremulous reunion with his long-lost daughter, miraculously spared after attempted murder, kidnapping, and imprisonment in a brothel. Though Noble's production, his farewell to the Royal Shakespeare Company, follows The Winter's Tale and The Tempest at the Roundhouse, he makes a good case for seeing Pericles not as late play but early musical.

Taking his cue from the plot's emphasis on the wheel of fortune and the moving spheres, Noble emphasizes the Roundhouse's shape both aurally and visually. Sounds and music surround the spectators, from the buzzing flies on the severed heads in the first scene to the bells ringing round the theatre at the end to evoke the music of the spheres. When Pericles compares the king to the sun, with other kings “like stars about his throne”, he is describing what we see—a small circular acting area in the centre, with a hanamichi occupied by musicians, concentric circles radiating from it and beautiful Middle Eastern lanterns giving light from above. The theatre's height allows for spectacular descents: the heads of the unsuccessful suitors at the beginning, Diana (a circus performer twirling in mid-air) near the end. Below the stage space, some spectators sit on Persian carpets. Belly-dancers and acrobats entertain. The Arabian Nights atmosphere is perhaps a celebration of (safely remote) Islamic culture.

Because of its narrative framework, with the medieval poet Gower as presenter, Pericles is sometimes treated as a play within a play. In this case, it is more like a song (which is what Gower initially calls it); at times it seems as if the actors exist simply to supplement the bouzouki, gaida, flutes and keyboard. Especially in the heavily cut first half, most characters (including Brian Protheroe's graceful, well-spoken Gower) are almost indistinguishable, with only Thaisa (Lauren Ward) and Cerimon (Jude Akuwudike) making much impression.

If the auditorium could have revolved, it would have provided a still better analogy for the Ptolemaic cosmos, the characters' sense of being carried away by fate, and the passivity induced in the audience itself by the visual and musical splendour. Moments that seem to invite a response (like the presentation of emblematic shields and the series of single combats) do not get it and many of the best lines, though well-spoken, fail to make an impact; the same is true of attempts at contemporary relevance such as the scene in famine-stricken Tharsus with its warning to prosperous countries to learn from its example. But in the final scenes, where the writing gives everyone more help, the play comes into its own. The brothel scenes work as well as usual, and Ray Fearon's Pericles becomes human, affecting, and funny, helped by the presence of Kananu Kirimi as his principled (and surprisingly Scottish) daughter. Since Noble uses the Oxford text, both roles have acquired additional lines from a contemporary prose version of the story by George Wilkins. Even so, their most important words are neither Wilkins's nor Shakespeare's, but those of the recurring theme song (by Shaun Davey) that links father, mother and daughter in a dreamy meditation about the winds of fortune.