Pericles, Prince of La Habana, Celebrating Cultures
/Pericles, Prince of La Habana
Presented in Spanish
La Casona en Linea, Havana, Cuba
June 2016
Celebrating Cultures
Director: Stuart Cox
Translation by Salvador Oliva and Angel Luis Pujante
Celebrating Cultures present a new production of William Shakespeare’s Pericles in a new translation by Salvador Oliva and Angel Luis Pujante.
Celebrating Cultures is an arts organization dedicated to working in different cultural contexts. It's founder and director, and the director of Pericles, is 66-year-old Stuart Cox who has a lifetime of experience working in theatre, especially, with the plays of William Shakespeare.
Pericles will use the context of Cuba itself, finding home grown cultural equivalents – a boxing tournament replaces knights in armour, a Santeria priest heals Pericles’ wife who is thought to have died. The play will be intertwined with Cuban vocal melodies and Caribbean percussion.
Cox originally had the idea of offering a Shakespeare workshop to show solidarity with Cuban actors. Carlos Diaz, director of Havana’s acclaimed Teatro El Publico, hosted the workshop and encouraged his young actors to participate in the workshop which took place in October 2014.
In June 2015 invitation was given by the Cuban cultural authorities to Stuart Cox to direct a full Shakespeare production. The decision to mount a production of one of Shakespeare’s last plays, Pericles, coincided with the international focus on Shakespeare and the many celebratory productions around the world during this year of the 400th anniversary of his death. Pericles will be one of Cuba's contributions.
Stuart Cox is driven to create theatre in different countries. He has also become something of an international Shakespeare specialist during his 45-year career, working with the acting of Shakespeare in Britain, India, the USA, Mexico and now Cuba.
His company ‘Celebrating Cultures’ seeks to merge cultural themes and Cox has directed, written and acted in productions from villages in the Rajasthan desert to mining towns in Mexico, using the folklore, myth and magic of the region to local audiences of all proportions.
Pericles, one of Shakespeare’s less typical plays, and originally set in the Mediterranean, transplants effortlessly to the Caribbean, from one sea to another where Pericles is shipwrecked. A myriad surreptitious coincidences draw in the audience to follow the twists and turns of the story, each new scene a surprise, contrasting vividly with the previous one.
Pericles takes part in two contests to win a bride, believes his wife to have died at sea in childbirth and that his daughter, 14 years later, has also died only to be reunited with both of them. Pirates sell his daughter to a brothel and his wife isn’t really dead. And so it goes, suspension of disbelief continually hanging by a thread in this fast paced, twisting tale of great loss and greater redemption filled with warriors, assassins, pirates, fishermen and whores.
Shakespeare's momentous tale and unforgettable characters combined with Cuba’s political, religious and unforgiving passion couldn’t fit a better Elizabethan glove.
Audiences will be kept small for an intense, pure and undiluted experience. Up close, personal and space-defiant. A ‘which way to look and what will come next?’ production, it will be contemporary, unpredictable, stimulating and exciting. Stuart Cox's style of theatre is centred on the actor, with nothing to distract from the psychological reality of Shakespeare's characters, the situations they find themselves in and, above all, the words he gives them to speak as they communicate to the audience their thoughts and feelings.
Selected Review:
http://oncubamagazine.com/culture/shakespeares-pericles-in-havana/
