[In the following excerpt, Clapp maintains that Adrian Noble's Royal Shakespeare Company (RSC) production of Pericles downplayed the unevenness of the play and notes that its setting reflected exotic absurdity in the juxtaposing of a chamber of horrors with Ali Baba's cave.]

Adrian Noble may be leaving the RSC in a mess, but he's brought a sparkle to its season at the Roundhouse. His production of Pericles is the liveliest thing seen there so far.

The exotic absurdity of Shakespeare's play is indulged to the hilt. In Peter McKintosh's design, the old steam-engine repair house becomes a chamber of horrors—severed heads swing like conkers on long ropes—and an Ali Baba's cave of delights, twinkling with lanterns, smelly with incense. A (sometimes overwhelming) eastern band of bouzouki, percussion and tuba thrums away. The goddess Diana dangles from the roof. In the title role, Ray Fearon swaggers like an Arabian Nights prince; his voice sounds out like a gong.

It's an externalising treatment, but Pericles is not a transporting play: its islands of bright words float in a murky sea of improbability. It was a success when first produced (Ben Jonson was apparently jealous when he described it as ‘mouldy’), but the dodgy version that's been passed down—not all by Shakespeare—is rickety, beginning as fairytale, taking in a terrific best brothel scene, and ending with the melancholy comforts of Shakespeare's last plays.

Noble's direction whisks over the play's bumpiness. It contains revelatory touches from Kananu Kirimi as Marina. She has a voice like a bell and moves with the abstraction of a real sea-creature. She's got dangerously quaint lines: she declares that when she stepped on a worm, she wept. She makes this sound like the simple truth.

Only one aspect of the production doesn't work at all. The promenade notion at the Roundhouse seems a phoney thing, introduced in accordance with some antiquated notion of hip. It's obtrusive and it slows things up. The cheaper tickets in the audience are moved out of the way so that a thespy beggar can stumble unimpeded onto the stage.