It can be sooo messy eating pomegranates
Incest, pedophilia, necrophilia and prostitution are just some of the themes William Shakespeare explores in his comedy, Pericles, Prince of Tyre.
If you’ve never heard of this particular work, you’re probably not alone. “It’s Shakespeare’s least-produced play,” claims Laurenzo Mierendor, one of the artistic directors of The Shatspearean Players, the company staging the production.
And if the name Shatspearean reminds you vaguely of one Capt. James T. Kirk (a.k.a. William Shatner), that’s no accident. “The name is a cross between Shatner and Shakespeare, because we think William Shatner is one of the greatest thespians to ever walk the planet, and his career started in Shakespeare,” says Mierendor.
The play opens with the title character solving a riddle in order to win the hand of a princess. However, the riddle’s solution reveals a terrible secret, for which Pericles knows the King will kill him, so he flees.
After surviving a shipwreck, he wins a tournament in another kingdom, earning him the hand of the King’s daughter. He decides to return home to Tyre with his pregnant wife, but she appears to die in childbirth, so he buries her body at sea.
Pericles’s daughter is raised by another noble family that, out of jealousy, plans to kill her. However, she’s kidnapped by pirates and ends up in a brothel before working as a private tutor.
Eventually, Pericles discovers his daughter and the wife he thought was dead are still alive, and the family is reunited.
“He faces the dark realities of the world and tries to run away from them, but destiny eventually catches up with him,” says Mierendor.
The Shatspearean Players’ mandate is to produce Shakespeare’s obscure works, focusing on the 30 plays that are rarely performed and scorning the seven that everybody knows all too well.
“It’s like a gold mine of work that nobody does,” says Mierendor. “We can bring two plays to Calgary each year for the next five years that have never even been done before in this city.”
Pericles was a popular play during Shakespeare’s life and was performed frequently, but in the decades following his death, questions arose as to whether Shakespeare really authored the play. As such, it was left out of several compilations of his plays and fell into comparative obscurity alongside some of his other works.
“The common man loved it too much and so academics tried to take it away from him,” says Mierendor.
While I am hardly qualified to enter into any discussion on the authorship of any of Shakespeare’s works, a brief scan of some of the research out there seems to suggest that Pericles was co-written by Shakespeare and an unknown author.
Mierendor doesn’t agree with this assessment, however. “I’m here to tell you it’s his work,” he says.
Pericles will be The Shatspearean Players’ second production. The first was The Life and Death of King Richard the Second, which they presented in January with 28 actors and a run time of 3.5 hours. By comparison, at two hours with a cast of 11, Pericles is a modest production.
Although he’s without a background in theatre (he’s a videographer), Mierendor possesses a love of Shakespeare. “I owned one of those ‘Complete Works’ when I was in high school. I always imagined one day I might try the stage. I was inspired by local companies in Calgary like Mob Hit, with their production of Titus Andronicus. I thought, I want to get in on this and bring Shakespeare to life,” he says.
The Shatspearean Players are staging Pericles, Prince of Tyre in the round and are using live guitarists as part of the show’s soundscape. “It’s bawdy, it’s raunchy, it touches a lot of different things that we still debate and shy away from today,” says Mierendor. “This isn’t your grandfather’s Shakespeare for sure.”
The Shatspearean Players already are planning for their next season with Coriolanus and Timon of Athens on the bill.
“I’d like to make Timons, Coriolanus, Pericles and Troilus and Cressida the new standards from now on,” he says.
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