SOURCE: Macaulay, Alastair. “Epic Tradition for Epic Tale.” Financial Times (1 April 2003): 15.

In the following review, Macaulay hails Yukio Ninagawa's staging of Pericles at London's National Theatre, asserting that the director utilized rich theatrical imagery to paint the odyssey of Shakespeare's protagonist.

Yukio Ninagawa's staging of Shakespeare's Pericles is sensational. Telling its epic tale—often employing one Japanese idiom or another—it moves through one thrilling effect after another. Severed heads hang in the air, streams of water pour from taps all round the stage, Pericles swims desperately through perspectived rows of painted waves, Thaisa holds her kimono around her like a chrysalis and then opens to Pericles like a lotus blossom to the sun; the dead Thaisa is resurrected, rising in her coffin until she is suspended a yard above it.

Ninagawa's resources seem endless; we seem to be watching a cast of hundreds, and the rich series...