Pericles at the Royal National Theatre [1994]

Phyllida Lloyd's opulent production of Pericles opened on May 19, 1994, on the Olivier stage of Britain's Royal National Theatre. It received reviews running the gamut of opinion from "brilliant" to "a real mess." The controversy this production caused suggests that it went right to the heart of perennial critical issues raised by Pericles: text versus spectacle and Shakespeare versus Not-Shakespeare, as well as to current critical debates surrounding modem versus postmodem theater. This was the National Theatre's first production of Pericles and one of its relatively few productions of Shakespeare. Because of the existence ofthe Royal Shakespeare Company, the National has an uneasy relationship with the Bard: The national poet should of course be performed on the national stage, yet there is an entire company devoted to his legacy. Therefore, although the National has produced a fair amount of Shakespeare during its first thirty-five years, it has never developed a genuine tradition of Shakespeare nor a distinctive approach to his work. However, as John Peter wrote in his review of Lloyd's Pericles, when the National Theatre does do Shakespeare, "they do not do it by halves.'"