[In the following excerpt, Kellaway applauds the audacity of Neil Bartlett's artistic vision in his Lyric, Hammersmith, staging of Pericles, noting that the sparse hospital-like setting foregrounded the vivid drama of each episode.]

Neil Bartlett's audacious treatment of Pericles suits it to perfection. This is a stunning production of a play that survives only in fragments—much of it not Shakespeare's handiwork. It would be good not to have to accept any substitutes—but necessary liberties have been taken: George Wilkins's The Painful Adventures of Pericles, Prince of Tyre (1608), is here employed to patch, if never invisibly to mend, the whole.

Bartlett works within the contrivances of the plot—enjoying its quirks—and yet creates a clearing within which Shakespeare's emotional climaxes are never obscured. Take Act Three—and the horror of the opening scene in which Pericles's wife Thaisa (winningly played by Sarah Malin) dies in childbirth on a ship. Pericles has not seen her since their daughter was born nor begun to weep for her before—for health and safety reasons—his crew insist he cast her overboard. This ghastly scene is made real by the sight of his wife wheeled in to him on a high bed, her white nightdress flowering with her blood. She is uncompromisingly present—and already absent.

And when later, the more challenging scene unfolds in which she turns out not to be dead at all—washed up in a coffin scented with spices—this also is played in a hyper-real way, with a medical team in white coats attendant on her. Clinical decisions are taken. But her revival is moving because of its impossibility—I wept as death was gradually, lyrically reversed.

Bartlett is responsible, too, for the enigmatic design, a set that appears to be the landing of a hospital (a chic one, with grey walls and black double doors) and the deck of a ship—a dreamed place. The set is perfect for a play that is a kind of reverie; there were many moments so beautiful I would like to have said: ‘Stop! Let's see that again.’ And there were points when—as if anticipating such a reaction—the actors did freeze. When Thaisa's father, Simonides (deliciously smarmy Martin Turner) agrees to the marriage between Pericles and his daughter and invites them to dance, they take up a position in each other's arms but do not move. The dance does not begin. It is a moment in which their present and future are held together—suggestive of initial strangeness and of intimacy to come.

Three actors, in an excellent cast, stand out: Pascale Burgess's Marina is like an ardent nun—all gawky angles but with a pure, pale face. Bette Bourne is an original and diverting Gower, a lecturer/narrator who instructs us from a blackboard and who also, hilariously, doubles as a bookie, taking bets on Thaisa's suitors (the production is full of witty detail). As Pericles, Will Keen, in gold pyjamas, has glamour and intensity. And while it is shocking to see him dwindle into an in-patient of Blakean aspect (pyjamas replaced by sorry dressing-gown) we already know that, in this play at least, while there is a ‘working pulse’, there's hope.