SOURCE: Potter, Lois. “Songs of Excess.” Times Literary Supplement, no. 5180 (12 July 2002): 19.

In the following excerpted review of the Royal Shakespeare Company production of Pericles, directed by Adrian Noble, Potter praises both the cast and the production's visual and musical splendor.

Eminent theatre directors who turn from Shakespeare to musical comedy, like Trevor Nunn and Adrian Noble, have an obvious precedent in Shakespeare himself. Pericles was a famous crowd-pleaser in its own time: scholars and directors, baffled by its uneven, possibly collaborative, text, have usually concentrated on the themes that it shares with other “late plays”—suffering, loss and reunion—and on the tense poetry of the hero's farewell to his dead wife, about to be buried at sea, or his tremulous reunion with his long-lost daughter, miraculously spared after attempted murder, kidnapping, and imprisonment in a brothel. Though Noble's production, his farewell to the Royal Shakespeare Company, follows...