Celebrating Cultures present a new production of William Shakespeare’s Pericles in a new translation by Salvador Oliva and Angel Luis Pujante.
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.
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.
Read More
