Tangled phonetics

Strange goings-on at the Globe. After a Tempest performed by Mark Rylance as a Reduced Shakespeare skit, we now have Pericles directed by Kathryn Hunter. This is a tricky, strange and fascinating dream-work. The text is so complex and elusive that the obvious approach is to play it straight and let the audience’s imagination fill in the gaps. Imagination. Audience. Not words many directors would welcome, since they imply a minimum of intervention. And here we have maximum intervention.

Kathryn Hunter has created a brash, stylish, modern-dress production which unfolds like a set of magazine photo-shoots. Everything is gorgeous, calculated, cocksure and superficial. On its own this would not be too bad but she has chosen two lead actors, Robert Lucksay and Marcello Magni, who were born not to play Shakespeare. One is Hungarian, the other Italian, and they perform the verse as if they’d learnt it on the way from Heathrow. Staging Shakespeare with actors who can’t speak English is like orchestrating Mahler for comb-and-tracing-paper or rebuilding Ely Cathedral with chewing gum. Consider the effect. Shakespeare’s language is already distant from ours by 400 years. Even in a performance of Lear or Macbeth, the keenest ear in the house must strain hard to catch every shade and complexity of his gnarled grammar and his dense, elaborate and highly idiosyncratic usages. In a lesser-known play like Pericles, these difficulties are compounded. To heap yet more obstacles on us by introducing the tangled phonetics of foreign actors is to dismiss the audience out of hand. What a shame that the Globe is so indifferent to Shakespeare’s music.