There are some stories that feel eternally relevant. Set in ancient Rome, and written more than 400 years ago, the brutal, volatile, ego-driven politics on display in Coriolanus seem to cut like a blade close to the throat of our own century and civilization. This is the second time in Bell Shakespeare’s history the company has mounted Shakespeare’s final tragedy, and director Peter Evans marshals an impressive, vigorous and robust undertaking of the play’s weighted themes. He’s helped by an excellent ensemble and a monumental lead in Hazem Shammas.
We, the theatre-going people, are also involved in the play’s politics from the start. Down the subtly lit hall of the Neilson Nutshell, in a small yet meaningful simulation of the class divide, the audience is split down an arbitrary and unbreachable line. Those seated on one side of the theatre are dubbed ‘patricians’ (the contemptuous ruling classes, whom costume designer Ella Butler has in charcoal suits and creamy loose-fitting garments); the other side are the ‘plebeians’ (who are hungry, angry, and fomenting rebellion). It is between these two groups and the Senate that the arrogant warrior Coriolanus becomes embroiled when he returns bloodied and victorious from war with the Volsces, the state’s enemy neighbours, and is offered the honourable role of consul.
Volumnia – a fiercely exceptional Brigid Zengeni, in her Bell Shakespeare debut, who gloats of her son’s many stab wounds with a sick adoring pride – would love for her national hero big boy to fulfil her problematic maternal dreams. The plebs, however, aren’t sold on the idea. Goaded by their class-conscious, plotting representatives (aka the tribunes), and despite the placatory efforts of power broker patrician Menenius (Peter Carroll), they grow enraged at Coriolanus’s open disdain for the corn-munching commoners of Rome. What follows is an avalanche of betrayals: one man’s unassailable jealous pride setting in motion exile, double-crossing, familial abandonment, and an empire buckling to its knees.
Virile, coiled and boilingly lethal, Shammas transfixes in his portrayal of this ‘noble warrior’ mamma’s boy with a self-sabotaging god complex. He seems hewn from mountain-forged steel ore – a war-forged weapon of reckless and entitled might, slashing up and down the long theatre (and the fragile social order of the republic). When asked to win the favour of the plebs, Shammas curdles his body in hatefully exaggerated postures of mock degradation (surrendering his ubermensch masculinity is a fate worse than death). His final scene is a work of art. Thinking back on it, if Coriolanus weren’t so deadly, and if gender double standards didn’t run so deep, this character would be a drama queen. Instead, he’s a beast.
(Any of this sounding familiar? Check the headlines today, there’s bound to be another man throwing a dangerous temper tantrum.)
The ensemble gathers actors who have impressed in recent work elsewhere, and it is highly satisfying to see them brought together in service to the granddaddy of western theatre and his incomparable storytelling. There’s Bell Shakespeare stalwart Jules Billington as primary pleb; Marco Chiappi (Death of a Salesman) and Matilda Ridgway (Furious Mattress) as tribunes; Anthony Taufa (The Lover and the Dumb Waiter) as Aufidius, who leans into the homoerotic coding of the Volsces leader towards his arch enemy Coriolanus. Carroll, nimble as ever in his physical performance and comic verve, is in his prime, and given more emotional depth and nuance here as Menenius than in other roles he’s recently been cast.
In a stripped-back production which adds just one moving wooden platform and sheer curtains to the stage, and Max Lyandvert’s understated sound design breathing in and out a subtle dread, Evans fixes our attention primarily on Shakespeare’s terrific speech and the performers’ bodies, which are ever in motion. His dramaturgy animates a long production (almost three hours with interval); although there is a touch of grim lethargy from the approaching tragedy in the second act. The modernisation of the play – with its eighties fashion and symbology, including rotary telephones and politburo benches – also feels at times like an oddly half-completed gesture, a concept hinted at, but never fully realised.
Coriolanus interrogates the idea of uncompromising principles, shows the relativity of virtue, and demonstrates what can go wrong when powerful world players are cast into ill-fitting roles. What is successful in one field of action can be just stupid in another. Should a warrior have been made a diplomat? Should a real estate mogul have been made president? The comparison is never made explicit, but it’s not hard to draw.
Coriolanus is playing at The Nielson Nutshell until Saturday, July 19. Find tickets and info over here.
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