The company’s co-artistic director on staging ‘Pericles’, late works and why every play doesn’t have to have a ‘forsooth’
“I am interested in late plays,” says director Tamara Harvey, as she settles into a seat in the gracious wood-panelled rehearsal room of the Royal Shakespeare Company’s Swan Theatre. “Something happens in some writers where they’ve had their big hits and they get to a point of devil-may-care — you can feel a confidence and a defiance in the writing.”
Her new production — her first as co-artistic director of the RSC with actor and director Daniel Evans — is a case in point. Shakespeare’s late romance Pericles, about the beleaguered Prince of Tyre, is packed with crazy incident. Its wild, wriggling narrative takes in numerous sea journeys, shipwrecks, pirates, incest, a brothel and a character revived from the dead….
