[In the following review, Hemming endorses Neil Bartlett's staging of Pericles at London's Lyric, Hammersmith, particularly noting the sparsely appointed stage which invited the audience to focus on the actors' fine performances.]

At first sight, Neil Bartlett's design for his own production of Pericles looks startlingly sparse. Shakespeare's late romance zig-zags across the Mediterranean, yet Bartlett gives us just an empty monochrome and rather clinical room. But very soon the setting makes sense. Rather than try to give us everything, Bartlett gives us nothing, encouraging us to paint in the backdrop imaginatively—thus the staging can focus on the story, rather than becoming bogged down in circumstantial detail.

More importantly still, this austere setting allows the play's emotional story to resonate. The place could be a mental institution—a place where people broken by their misfortune reside. It could simply be the arena of the mind, where fantastical stories come alive, allowing the possibility that Pericles's journey is an interior voyage of self-knowledge. Most poignantly, it could be a hospital, a place of birth and death and resuscitation, a place where people feel all too keenly that desperate longing that courses through the play—to see dead loved ones breathe again. Perhaps it is all three.

All these possibilities, seem to make the drama more vivid, while the setting also holds it together. The play, in which Pericles rattles around finding loved ones, losing them and then finding them again, is a rambling affair, not all written by Shakespeare, and Bartlett makes clarity the hallmark of his fine production. Here the chorus character of Gower becomes a janitor (a droll Bette Bourne) armed with a blackboard on which he draws a sketch-map to help us keep track of Pericles's wanderings.

Against this, the story unfolds with admirable lucidity and emotional truth. Will Keen as Pericles brings off the difficult task of playing an essentially decent man, giving his character a troubled intensity. There are many very nice supporting performances and two lovely ones, from Sarah Malin and Pascale Burgess as Pericles's wife and daughter. Occasionally the production loses momentum, but it carries off the fantastical plot developments, and, most importantly of all, brings a luminous intensity to the great reconciliation scene between father and daughter. The production goes straight to the heart of this wise play about love and loss.