This is a striking and very physical production of Shakespeare’s study of Roman politics, power and personal pride given a staging in modern dress, though its protagonists fight with swords as well as words.
Ed Devlin’s setting consists of multiple columns of concrete that can be a screen for video projection or rise like a curtain to disclose public and private spaces, often with displays of classical sculptures and pottery like the museum-like space that Rome’s riff-raff are storming in the opening action.
Inevitably, you think of the mob in Washington DC storming the Capitol and protesters spraying slogans on Rome’s she wolf statue of demos closer to home, but Lyndsey Turner’s production isn’t trying to draw parallels. Though Coriolanus is about populism and where power lies, Caius Marcius, the battle-scarred hero who is dubbed Coriolanus by his grateful city, is very different from former President Donald Trump. He isn’t interested in playing to the populace and duplicity is not part of his character.
Elegantly sipping champagne in a brown velvet jacket, David Oyelowo’s Coriolanus is an aristocrat among the high elite, but he sparks into pulsing life, sword in hand, as a warrior. That seems to be where he finds himself.
It is his mother, a woman who declares she would happily see multiple sons slaughtered if gaining glory, who has reared and shaped him. She urges him to stand for Consul, and Pamela Homvete’s proud and steely Volumnia can’t be denied.
Hidebound by his sense of honour and duty—his own honour and duty—Coriolanus can’t play the political game. Tribunes Brutus (Jordan Metcalfe) and Sicinius (Stephanie Street) can and do; this production gives them prominence, and Peter Forbes makes Menenius more sharp-tongued and a less gentle peacemaker than I have usually thought him.
When pushed into exile, Coriolanus turns his back on Rome, and we get a release of real feeling. When outside its gates, he returns ready to attack her, and his mother, his wife and his young son are sent out to beg that he desists: this is turned into an impressive ritual, but I missed the moment when Caius Marcus again bowed to his mother’s will, so sealing his own fate, which, unlike the celebrated fall of Olivier’s performance, is here the gruesome antithesis of the death Coriolanus would have wanted, in its own way just as dramatic.
It is an ending that isn’t quite the end, for there is a final image to what is a spectacular production where design, music and lighting contribute a great deal and so effectively that they sometimes take attention away from the spoken.