SOURCE: Wilson, Richard. “Patterns of Impatience.” Times Literary Supplement, no. 5219 (11 April 2003): 21.

In the following excerpt, Wilson comments on Yukio Ninagawa's thematic fusion of Western and Japanese cultures in his interpretation of Pericles's odyssey, stressing its spiritual component as the protagonist rediscovers his soul.

“Shakespeare leaves the sorting-out for later”, Unwin writes. One reason he remains our contemporary is certainly that the problems he poses are the unfinished business of today. His own attempts to sort them out in the late romances only confirm how hard this will be, but Yukio Ninagawa's Japanese reading of Pericles at the National Theatre makes it imperative to start, since it opens with an awesome procession of mutilated victims, who are those “poor wretches” Lear forgot in his mania to “Kill, kill, kill!”. And, as it happens, Pericles has an uncanny relation to the war of the worlds exploded in King Lear, being...