Coriolanus

At the magnetic centre of this Coriolanus is Hazem Shammas’ riveting performance of the title character.  He is surrounded by other subtle, intriguing and beautifully judged performances, but it’s Shammas who holds it all together.  When we see him harshly lit, bare-chested, and drenched in blood, we believe this is a fearsome, stop-at-nothing, force of nature warrior.  But he is, as well by turns, impossibly proud, contemptuous, vain, humble, embarrassed, sly, funny, even endearing, and dangerously vulnerable.  Coriolanus is at bottom a soldier, and his metier is violence; the rest is pretence and... unfair, and, well, confusing.

Director Peter Evans makes a superb casting choice here.  Although Shammas handles the verse with confidence and clarity, he looks like a street fighter with whom one would not want to tangle – and that adds another layer to Volumnia (Brigid Zengeni), his mother’s powerful ambition for her son...  

Coriolanus the play may seem like a simple story.  In ancient Rome, war hero Coriolanus is the ruling class (patrician) pick for Consul; his pushy mother urges him on.  The lower classes (plebians) don’t want him – but there’s a famine and they’re starving.  Coriolanus refuses to shmooze them, insults them, is accused of treason and is banished.  So, he joins forces with Rome’s greatest enemy, the Volscians, and leads an attack on Rome.  His mother persuades him to call it off...

This production goes well beyond the apparent straightforward narrative.  It’s notable for its emotional and logical strength in making the ambiguities and apparent contradictions so clear – which it achieves with characteristic Bell Shakespeare means: a cast of only ten play a multitude of characters – with much doubling – only Shammas and Carroll are not called upon for the ensemble.  Ella Butler’s costume designs help with these demands: they’re contemporary but suggestive – and the all-white costumes for Volumnia and Virgilia (Suzannah McDonald), Coriolanus’ trophy wife (so it seems here) are just right – that is, not quite right.  Peter Evans’ set is minimalist but perhaps requiring rather too many set changes between scenes.  

But what makes this story so powerful, so intriguing and gripping is its unrelenting narrative drive, and its ambivalences and ambiguities.  No one’s motive is entirely clear.  The ruling class patricians want to install Coriolanus as Consul, but why?  Because they admire him?  Old Menenius (a delightful Peter Carroll) seems to say so.  Perhaps the patricians want Coriolanus as a figure they can control - along with their grip on Rome’s food supply.  As if...  Does Coriolanus even want to be Consul anyway?  The role - as well as what he has to do to become Consul - makes him deeply uncomfortable... And do the plebians’ dodgy Tribunes (Marco Chiappi and Martha Ridgeway) really have the people’s welfare at heart, or are they after some class-war power for themselves?  The plebians – portrayed as usual by Shakespeare as fickle and easily manipulated – show not a shred of awe or gratitude towards the man who has saved Rome over and over – but they’re hungry and, as Brecht said, ‘Food first, morality follows after.’ 

Coriolanus’ character and motives are thrown into sharp contrast by his military antagonist, Volscian leader Aufidius (Anthony Taufa in another fine performance) who is also a soldier first, but without all the folderol and confusion that attends on Coriolanus.  Despite Aufidius’ admiration and near homo-erotic attraction to Coriolanus, the latter is a military asset.  Anthony Taufa plays the difference between them with fine suggestive restraint.

Last year in London, I saw a National Theatre production of Coriolanus – with, at a guess, triple the cast size and four times the budget, and David Oyelowo in the lead. This Bell Shakespeare iteration lacks the spectacle, but it’s superior in performance and character depth.  Of Shakespeare’s ‘great tragedies’, this is surely one, its politics and central characters so resonant with our world.

Michael Brindley

Photographer: Brett Boardman