Coriolanus

With this obscurest of Shakespeare’s dramas, Bell Shakespeare really takes flight in its newish harbourside flexible theatre space at Sydney’s Walsh Bay.

Seating this time is pushed to either side of a traverse stage, along which an impressive cast clash for supremacy as plebeians and patricians in Rome’s early republic. 

Compared to when the company used the boxed proscenium of the SOH’s Playhouse, imaginations are released and the BSC actors more three dimensional and with a clarity often missing. One even leans into the audience to get someone to answer the onstage phone - and relay the bad news.

This Coriolanus is a modern dress, circa late twentieth century, adaptation of how the audacious soldier slaughtered the Volscians at Coriolli in about 400BC. Patrician allies back in Rome urge him to convert his military honours into political power and run for consul.  But instead of sweet talking the plebeians, who first favour this strongman, Coriolanus shouts endless tirades against their laziness. Thrown into exile, he seeks revenge by joining forces with his former enemy.

Shakespeare offers little insight into what motivates this angry anti-hero, but Hazem Shammas is explosively charismatic in the role, quicksilver and athletic, and fearlessly adding a cheeky vaudevillian humour (a quality he employed less successfully in his Macbeth for BSC).

Peter Carroll excels as the quirky Menenius struggling to keep the peace; and Matilda Ridgway and Marco Chiappi as the plebeians tribunes conjure ardent trade unionists. Suzannah McDonald softens the rancour as Coriolanus’s loving wife and Bridget Zengeni is exact and commanding as his mother, if perhaps even too engaging given Volumnia’s blood-thirsty mania.

Peter Evans’ design features a rostrum regularly moved across the long space into new scenes effectively lit by Amelia Lever-Davidson to rumbling or climatic sounds by Max Lyandvert. 

The play is long and dense of language, and not psychologically subtle, so while Evans’ direction runs a welcome pace, clarity is still sometimes swallowed. The joy is to see this play so successfully unearthed and in a space so generously employed by this talented ensemble.

It also includes Septimus Caton and Gareth Reeves as patricians, Anthony Taufa as the calculating Volscian leader, and an always convincing Jules Billington.

Martin Portus

Photographer: Brett Boardman