Public Acts (inspired by the New York Public Theater’s Public Works) is a programme to create what the blurb calls not community theatre productions but “acts of theatre and community”. For its first production, lasting for only three performances, the National Theatre collaborated with eight community organisations and the Queen’s Theatre, Hornchurch. Chris Bush’s “remix” of Shakespeare’s late romance was staged under Emily Lim’s direction with a cast of around 120, plus choirs and musicians, of whom six were professional actors.

Those are the facts; the judgement is more complex. Lim and the company deserve unalloyed respect for pulling off such a complex piece of work. The community performers were not used simply as undifferentiated crowds, but as discrete groups with individual identities. Choirs delivered musical numbers ranging from gospel jubilees to a Bulgarian threnody. The costuming of a gang of pirates in black and white seemed gratuitous until a ska band struck up and the pirates offloaded a full-throttle 2-Tone routine. Conversely, a team of Asian drummers welcomed Pericles’ beloved Thaisa (Naana Agyei-Ampadu, excellent) onstage not by playing their tablas but by reciting the percussive rhythms in spoken padhant. There were at least two dance-offs in less than 100 minutes of uninterrupted action.

However, community productions almost always manage to seem laudable and patronising at the same time, and putting such a production on the NT’s main stage with all of those resources runs the risk of making that paradox even starker. There is of course no reason why community cannot be defined in terms of faith, ethnicity or physical ability – even saying it sounds reactionary – yet, in practice, it can look at times like a parade of inclusivity as an end in itself rather than in the service of a dramatic production. Moreover, and again however genuinely inclusive the result, it’s always hard to deploy winsome pre-teen children (whether playing the young Marina or breakdancing one of Thaisa’s suitors off the stage) without seeming to be opting simply for a Pavlovian “Ahhh!” response.

The most problematic aspect of all is the status of the production itself. At a certain point it crosses a line from inventive reimagining to... I don’t want to say dumbing down, but simplification. I’m more familiar with the plot of Pericles than with its text, so I remain uncertain whether I heard a single phrase of Shakespeare’s before the final reunion of Pericles and his daughter Marina. I repeat, Lim’s production worked a treat as such, but why, for instance, invent a back-story for Pericles’ travels? Why disdain to keep Thaisa alive for the ending? Why not just cut an hour from the running time, rather than cutting two and inserting an hour of new material? There was a distinct whiff of the nonsensical notion that common folk need to have Shakespeare boiled down to make it accessible for them. And if this is such a noteworthy production at the NT and all, why only three nights? Another pong, this time of tokenism. Would it have been better not to do this at all? Certainly not, but it would have been better to pitch it more carefully.

Written for the Financial Times.