Years ago, I acquired a book about one of the early years of the Stratford Festival. The author gave a detailed description of the rehearsal process leading to the Festival's first-ever production of Shakespeare's final Roman play, Coriolanus. This legendary production starred Paul Scofield, one of the great stage and (occasionally) film actors of the last half of the 20th century. Against him in the role of Coriolanus' mother, Volumnia, was the Canadian actor Eleanor Stuart. The author of the book described how Stuart called on the trait of "sheer power" to play the scene where she has to subdue her strong-willed, powerful son to her own will. It's a hair-raising concept, the idea of an actor simply cranking the emotional-intensity dial all the way up to the red-line, and then advancing the vocal-authority dial to match. Subtle, it isn't, but in the right hands and at the right moment, it becomes totally breathtaking!
Which brings me to Thursday night, when the National Theatre Live series at Cineplex presented a production from the still more adventurous Donmar Warehouse theatre in London (UK) of -- wait for it -- Coriolanus. I never saw that amazing Scofield-Stuart partnership in the play (hey, I was only 7 years old at the time) but I have seen it staged a couple of times at Stratford, and it always leaves me feeling that there has to be more that could be done with it. The Donmar Warehouse production pushed the limits of stage power in every conceivable direction, leaving me instead with the feeling that I had been involved in a major car wreck.
For Coriolanus, the character, is indeed a man who invites and actively participates in his own destruction. No blind fate here, as in (for instance) the story of Oedipus. Coriolanus is indeed the tragic hero brought low by his own faults, and Shakespeare cuts right to the core of the tragic dilemma by showing how his basest faults are in fact his greatest strengths.
It`s a very big role. Big in length of lines, big in domination of scenes, big in emotional scale, and positively epic in the arc of the character upwards to glory and at once downwards to darkness. This daunting combination of extremes explains why Coriolanus usually stars an actor of 40-some years, one who has been on the stage long enough to acquire the skills and experience to play this formidable character believably. Tom Hiddleston, at age 33, is therefore a younger-than-average Coriolanus. But the casting works magnificently with the script, because the faults of Coriolanus are those often found in younger people: too great a trust in your own innate abilities, too great a certainty that you are always right, and above all too much awareness that you are the only possible person for the job and that they will have to let you do it. Hiddleston conveyed all these and other sides of a complex character with both power and subtlety. (The Donmar Warehouse space is small enough that whole scenes can be and are played very quietly without losing the audience`s attention.)
Sometimes on an older man these characteristics can seem like mere pig-headed petulance. Since Tom Hiddleston actually looks younger than his age, he projects the youthful energy and the youthful stubbornness with equal conviction.
I started with that long story about Eleanor Stuart playing Volumnia, because the surprise of the evening for me came with Deborah Findlay`s performance of that role. I`ve seen her a couple of times before in National Theatre Live presentations, but always in more kindly, caring, empathetic roles (such as the Steward in Timon of Athens). I had trouble squaring the needs of Volumnia with my previous experience of her work, fine as it has been.
I needn`t have worried. Exactly as the play requires, Findlay first encourages and directs her son, then finally wraps him neatly around her middle finger and traps him into doing the one thing he is determined not to do. Her performance of that powerhouse scene where she persuades him not to take his revenge on Rome was absolutely breathtaking in its strength, nuance, and vocal authority.
Among the smaller roles, I was most impressed by Mark Gatiss as the "humorous patrician", Menenius. He simply played the role in a manner that I felt clearly derived from that two word self-description -- a most necessary quality, since Menenius provides what little comic relief there is in this dark and dangerous world.
The third main "character" of the play, to my mind, is a composite: the mob of Roman plebeians and the two "tribunes of the people" who direct and control them. The tribunes, Brutus and Sicinia, were played to great effect by Elliot Levey and Helen Schlesinger. Now, anyone who knows the play will have caught on right away. The tribune's real name is Sicinius, and was meant by the author to be a man. Director Josie Rourke has actually pulled off a double gender-role reversal here. Of the two, Sicinius/a is the more hard-hearted, violent-tempered, ruder, while Brutus is calmer, quieter, more apt to persuade than to order. Rourke has given the role of the tribune displaying the more traditionally "masculine" qualities to the woman of the pair. Schlesinger and Levey made a fine partnership in these smaller roles, sometimes coming across as Tweedledum and Tweedledee, and sometimes appearing more as the yin and yang of the populist movement.
The "mob" which they direct and control to such devastating effect is actually a smaller group in this production, just four people with the lines of the people divided between them. This diverse group of rabble each had their own distinct personalities and each had their own distinct accents. The scene where they gave their assent to Coriolanus as a consul was played with the extremest degree of irony.
Director Josie Rourke has achieved a taut, electrifying production of the play, creating the most memorable stage pictures on a bare floor with a single ladder rising at the back, and with only a handful of utilitarian chairs used to create interior spaces. Right from the opening moment when a young boy painted an off-kilter red rectangular outline on the floor, the play gripped. Lighting is of tremendous importance in this kind of bare-space staging, and the lighting effects were used most convincingly, and thankfully not over-used. Costuming, too, was thankfully kept simple, with all characters clothed in relatively period-less adaptations of modern dress.
I have two major issues. The first was that ironic scene of the people assenting to the consulship of Coriolanus. The ironic tone of their voices led me to think that the script was about to deviate into conspiracy politics on another level, a kind of "Occupy Movement" that doesn't actually exist in the play. It was, for me, a slightly confusing choice.
The other one was the use of a literal waterfall of blood at the moment when Coriolanus meets his death. That his body should be suspended in the air upside down in a kind of reverse crucifixion metaphor is not shocking -- Olivier did something similar in his 1937 Old Vic production, as I have read. But after Coriolanus had his throat cut by the conspirators, what was the point of having his enemy Aufidius stand underneath him to be drenched by a shower of blood? Combined with the suspended effect, the net result came across like some kind of ritual of expiation for Aufidius and there is nothing in the text whatsoever to support that. Indeed, this portrayal of the final scene resulted in a cut of one of the key moments of the script -- when the happily avenged Aufidius plants his foot on the body of the dead Coriolanus, to be told by one of the Volscian senators, "Tread not upon him." A man capable of stepping on his dead enemy is not a man feeling the need to seek forgiveness of sins! The more I thought about that revisionist ending, the more I found that it dissatisfied me.
But that was a minor blot on a remarkable performance -- full of power, subtlety, passion, and with sparks of energy flying off the stage in every scene.
One other minor technical note: for some reason, the sound level in this cinema broadcast was set lower than usual. That actually made it a bit difficult to hear the voices in some of the quieter scenes. No way of knowing if that was a universal problem, or just a technical glitch at the particular location where I viewed the production.
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