Coriolanus

by William Shakespeare

  1. Frank Benson as Coriolanus, 1893-1919, was full of "noble thought and subtle spirit."

  [He] realises that Coriolanus and the people--the "voices" as the hero scornfully calls them--are the true and only protagonists. He concentrates all his energy on vitalising the conflict between the individual and the crowd, and the result, all things considered, is a triumph.40

  In 1931, William Poel confused critics with a radically adapted production at the Chelsea Palace Theatre. This production cut over half the play, reducing the role of the mob and Aufidius in favor of the relationship between Coriolanus and Volumnia. Coriolanus' death occurred offstage; rather than following his mother into Rome after the supplication scene, he turned and strode through the opposite gates of Corioli. This was followed "by a dissonant mixture of sounds: singing and dancing on one side of the platform stage, and the sounds of Coriolanus's death on the other."41

  Rene-Louis Piachaud's adaptation caused riots in Paris in 1934, with the play evoking extreme reactions from a crowd sensitive to loaded political statements. Coriolanus flourished in Germany under the Third Reich, with Coriolanus mandated to be a powerful, self-willed leader betrayed by unthinking masses. Under these conditions, all Erich Engel could do in his 1937 production was "keep the memory of the play alive in a production that avoided equally the vilifying of the people and the undue heroicizing of Coriolanus,"42 yet critics responded favorably to the impression of unvarnished truth. The play's Nazi associations caused it to fall out of favor in postwar Germany until Bertolt Brecht's intervention.

  The relevance of Ben Iden Payne's Stratford 1939 production was strongly remarked:

  At this time it is especially apt for production, since it deals with the clash of States, the making and breaking of treaties and alliances, the bitter, indissoluble antipathies of the autocrat and the demagogue, the reactions of the common people to various methods of incitement and appeasement, and the unending struggle of private affection against public hate.43

  Alec Clunes captured the "tyrannical splendour"44 of Coriolanus, while Sicinius Velutus had transformed from stock villain to something more interesting, "a gaunt, forbidding figure with frightening fingers and a positively terrifying reserve of private and professional hatred against the despot." The large battle scenes, however, were "conducted with a complete failure to recognise the offside rule and a tendency on each side to wear the other's colours."45 In 1952, the play returned to Stratford. In Glen Byam Shaw's production, "the frightening rabble is the real star."46 Again, the conflict between man and mob was central: the "general's patriotism and his relapse into defiant dictatorship provide eternal arguments for and against democracy, all as fiercely topical as ever."47

  Two productions in 1954 continued to explore the play's power. While Michael Benthall's Old Vic production was most noted for his casting of Richard Burton and Fay Compton, the play's final image of Coriolanus' butchered body was powerful, at the sight of which the conspirators, "seized with terror of their old conqueror, slink and run and flee into the darkness, tripping over each other in panic fear."48 Meanwhile, at New York's Phoenix Theater, John Houseman innovatively avoided taking sides, allowing a "high-profile crowd and sympathetic tribunes [to be] counterbalanced by a Herculean Martius."49

  The next Stratford production set the tone for all subsequent productions. Laurence Olivier had played the role at the Old Vic in 1938, imagining Coriolanus as a victim of "arrested development" with his "reliance on and subservience to his mother, his almost schoolboy hatred of Aufidius, and the special fury at the taunt of 'boy of tears.' "50 Twenty-one years later at Stratford, Olivier's proud, majestic, and disdainful Coriolanus had a sardonic smile playing constantly around his lips and was memorably physical, including a "death leap" that saw him stabbed mid-leap and fall dangerously from a high platform.

  2. Peter Hall production, 1959. Laurence Olivier as Coriolanus was "memorably physical, including a 'death leap' that saw him stabbed mid-leap and fall dangerously from a high platform."

  Laurence Olivier turns Coriolanus into something new. He is a man interested only in war, unhappy when he is not fighting, and taking pleasure only in the sight of blood, even if it is his own ... Bully and hero by turn, his voice rough and clipped ... he and his director, Peter Hall, drag us inevitably to their conclusion--that although we need such men in war, this is an argument against war, not for such men.51

  Brecht's work on the play, which began in 1951, took the play's political implications even further. Although he died before it reached production, Manfred Wekwerth and Joachim Tenschert staged a version of his text in 1964. Brecht depicted the masses

  taking an active role in bringing about and defending the Roman Republic and thereby provides role models with which the East German "masses" could identify and from which they could learn ... Through the collective action of the masses, Roman society develops to a point where it no longer needs military heroes, and Coriolanus falls because he cannot comprehend that military specialists have now become redundant and even dangerous for the state.52

  Brecht's text had a long afterlife: a 1970 production by the Seville-based Tabanque company was "the first 'Shakespearean' drama to make any impact during the Franco years" in Andalusia.53 The next major German production was produced by Hans Hollman at Munich's Residenztheater in 1970, and offered a "grim plea for pacifism,"54 reflecting changing political concerns with a more even-handed approach that allowed for moral ambiguity in all figures. Wekwerth and Tenschert directed a further production of the play in London in 1971.

  Michael Langham's 1961 production at Stratford, Ontario, was a box-office disaster despite Paul Scofield's performance in the title role, but was influential in using an unusually full text and Elizabethan-style acting space. Coriolanus was read through a Freudian lens; dominated by Eleanor Stuart's overbearing Volumnia, he found a surrogate parent figure in Aufidius. This latter relationship was gaining increasing prominence: Tyrone Guthrie's 1963 Nottingham production focused on the jealousy of Ian McKellen's Aufidius that directly occasioned his betrayal, emphasized by his stamping on the corpse's crotch and flinging himself over the body. McKellen returned to the play as Coriolanus for Peter Hall's 1984 National Theatre production. Again, the homoerotic relationship between Coriolanus and Greg Hicks's Aufidius was key, with moments such as their embrace of unification made prominent. As Aufidius welcomed Coriolanus to Antium:

  He gazes in exultation at Coriolanus' body, allowing the image to sink in and the dynamic to build before advancing with open arms ... Aufidius delivers a large portion of his speech while still in Coriolanus's arms, suiting the action to the word as they now contend as hotly for love as ever they did in hate.55

  Deborah Warner produced an intimate production for London's Almeida in 1986, and in 1993 was invited to direct the play for the Salzburg summer festival. Warner's conception of Coriolanus as "a play of overwhelming humanity and touching the heart,"56 however, did not meet the expectations of German-speaking critics more familiar with Brecht's didactic, antimilitaristic version. British productions were increasingly displaying a general disillusion with war and the very concept of "heroes." The 1990-91 English Shakespeare Company production opened

  with a bang--several bangs--and the flare of searchlights. A Solidarity-style banner is unfurled, sirens wail, police loud-hailers order the crowd to disperse. Before long the riot-shields are out, and tear gas is billowing across the stage.57

  The grim setting saw the slogan-chanting mob already wielding considerable power. Michael Pennington's Coriolanus "epitomizes the scarred, battle-hardened military machine, mouthing with contempt the popular slogan 'The people are the city.' "58 Taking a similar political stance, Stephen Berkoff directed the play in Munich in 1991, then again in 1995-96 in the UK. Setting the production to military drums, the production parodied warfare and Berkoff played Coriolanus in the manner of "a cheerfully sinister nightclub bouncer who likes people to think that he had once been a big-time boxer."59
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  Jonathan Kent's epic 2000 production in the hangar-like space of London's Gainsboro Studios starred Ralph Fiennes as Coriolanus. Most praise was reserved for Barbara Jefford's Volumnia who "presents a truly definitive performance. In her fierce, sensual embrace, Coriolanus becomes a little boy again; her domination of him being not merely emotional, but all-consuming."60 The scale of this production contrasted with Andrew Hilton's intimate 2001 version at Bristol's Tobacco Factory, in which "Gyuri Sarossy's young hero is like an impatient public-school prefect forced to seem friendly to oiks from the local comprehensive."61 Evoking the French Revolution, Hilton's reading showed an aristocracy being challenged by "the first clamours for democracy."

  Following the World Trade Center attacks, Georges Lauvadant's modern-dress staging of the play in 2001 at Spain's Teatre Nacional de Catalunya addressed contemporary paranoia surrounding "the threat to the 'metropolis' from an unspecified 'other,' "62 and expressed a palpable disillusion with politics itself. Toneelgroep Amsterdam in 2009 had a similar agenda in choosing the play to open its six-hour Roman Tragedies. Coriolanus introduced a world of self-promotion and bureaucratic wrangling in which Fedja van Huet's Coriolanus, chafing in a suit, was forced to participate in a television debate with the tribunes. The war hero, out of his element in the political arena, eventually rose to the tribunes' insults in the only way he knew how, overturning the tables in an outburst of violence. Increasingly, in the twenty-first century, Coriolanus is providing bleak commentary on the hypocrisy and self-serving interests of the political classes.

  The play has rarely been filmed. Elijah Moshinsky's television adaptation was one of the more abstract of the BBC Shakespeare series, setting much of the action in narrow streets and enclosed spaces. The homoerotic element between Coriolanus and Aufidius was given particular emphasis, with Coriolanus stripping down for their battle, and Moshinsky took full advantage of the television medium to present Coriolanus' death as a private moment in which Coriolanus whispered "kill" to Aufidius, willing his own death. In 2011, Ralph Fiennes's movie finally brought the play up to date on the big screen. Set in Belgrade, this visceral version was set in the contemporary theater of war and made a strong case for the play's ongoing relevance in a world where, more than ever, our leaders are held up to intensive public scrutiny.

  AT THE RSC

  "What Is the City but the People?" (3.1.232)

  John Barton's 1967 production in the Royal Shakespeare Theatre was the first at Stratford after Peter Hall's acclaimed production of 1959 with Laurence Olivier as Coriolanus, regarded by many as the "greatest Coriolanus of modern times."63 Theater historian John Ripley describes designer John Bury's Rome as

  a primitive wooden compound where totems towered above the palisade. Against a permanent black backcloth, figures in black leather armor and black furs bore black shields in black-gloved hands ... Sharp-edged metal was a pervasive presence: branched iron and copper standards, forests of spears, and gigantic, spiked, oblong shields announced a violent, even sadistic, society, dominated by a ruthless warrior class. The citizens, in straw hats and dark woollens, betrayed, by way of contrast, a visual vulnerability, if no less ferocity and cupidity than their betters.64

  Critic Milton Shulman saw the production as politically "fence-sitting,"65 agreeing with Ripley's view that Barton downplayed the politics by presenting corrupt, ineffective Tribunes and few, non-individualized, citizens who, in Ripley's view, "failed to discharge their function in his societal critique."66 Peter Lewis, however, argued

  There is the smell of a very small-town Rome in the dirty-faced crowds, fussed over by their tribunes (excellently played by Nicholas Selby and Clive Swift like a couple of shop stewards with a grudge against management).67

  3. Trevor Nunn production, 1972. "Spectacle was of the essence ... Huge crowds ... filled the heaving stage ... the great bronze she-wolf was held aloft on poles ... a ragged plebeian lay dead." Act 2 Scene 1, Coriolanus (Ian Hogg) returns in triumph and kneels to his mother, Volumnia (Margaret Tyzack).

  In 1972 Coriolanus was the first in Trevor Nunn's chronological cycle of Shakespeare's Roman plays. The RST stage had been extended, jutting into the auditorium beyond the proscenium arch.

  It was a spectacular production whose urge to impress with special effects provoked Frank Marcus to rechristen Nunn "Cecil B. de Nunn."68 The opening was particularly impressive:

  Spectacle was of the essence ... Huge crowds, both Roman and Volscian, filled the heaving stage. In an introductory tableau, the great bronze she-wolf was borne aloft on poles by bronze-masked automata while Romulus and Remus were held up to the vulpine teats. This image of a Rome implacably in pursuit of a national destiny, a commitment to which individual ambition must bow or be broken, set the tone for the cycle. In the wake of the procession, a ragged plebeian lay dead--a negligible sacrifice to nationalistic ambition.69

  In contrast to 1967, Rome was represented as a brightly lit white box. Nunn (with Buzz Goodbody) paid more attention to the plebeians who were individualized and represented as skilled craftsmen at work. The cultural distinctions between Romans and Volsces was emphasized:

  Christopher Morley ... has provided a beautiful white box: and some singularly efficient stage machinery spirits up moving steps and marble seats for the Senate. For the plebs the stage is hung with black skins, and reverberates with forges and carpenters' shops. The Volsci are beautiful, fighting Incas.70

  Peter Thomson, however, thought there was "something altogether haywire about the Volsces" and that "the polarity for which the production strove is not present in the text." In contrast he saw the representation of conflict between patricians and plebeians as more successful:

  The Roman opposition of plebeians and patricians was both more effective and more consistent. The finest moments of political confrontation were attended always by the admirably-played tribunes. By letting their voices simply say the words, and by seeming always to be confiding in each other, Raymond Westwell and Gerald James found secret corners all over the stage. They were not content to create so much as to indicate revolutionary processes, like Marxist opportunists exploiting social confrontations without themselves resorting to terrorism: "Let's to the Capitol, And carry with us ears and eyes for th'time, But hearts for the event." (2.1.274-76)71

  Terry Hands's 1977 production with Alan Howard in the title role was widely praised and admired. Many were impressed by its power, energy, and control. Jean Vache saw it as an example of Artaud's theater of cruelty: "the whole performance is one long, obsessive death-march and no over-simple identifications are possible, either with the enemies of Coriolanus (portrayed as sly demagogues), or with Coriolanus, a none-too-pitiable misfit, more than half in love with himself and self-annihilation."72 Hands explained how "In this production I am anxious to keep away from extremes ... I don't think that Coriolanus is about politics."73 Irving Wardle argues that Hands's 1977 production offered a complete contrast to Nunn's:

  There could be no greater contrast with the republican treatment of the play in the RSC's "Romans" season than this new version by Terry Hands. In place of an historically detailed setting, the action is taken out of time and reduced to theatrical essentials. Farrah's set consists simply of two huge doorways at the back wall and mid-stage positions, and instead of crowds, the competing forces are represented by small compact groups who make their statements in formalized riot and slow-motion battle, casting superhuman shadows, and then freeze or vanish into the darkness. The whole show is lit directionally so that individuals get heightened prominence at the expense of democratic spectacle.

  A nonpolitical production of Coriolanus sounds a contradiction in terms, but Mr Hands has gone as far as it is possible to achieving one. It appears to be rooted in the current dread of collectivism ... the performance escapes politics by concentrating on the conflict between those who bend to circumstances and the one character who cannot do such violence to his own nature. The two Tribunes (Tim Wylton and Oliver Ford-Davies) are
not treated as buffoons; they simply act together, looking to each other for support and often speaking in unison. The same could be said of the patrician faction. All this has the effect of subduing individual character, but in the circumstances the sacrifice is worthwhile.74

  Not all critics were persuaded by his nonpolitical approach, but Carol Chillington argued that Hands

  lets the play swing, as if on a heavy pendulum, between its questions and counter-questions, claims and counter-claims ... The play itself is stark--not even a subplot spaces out the relentless narrative--and nothing in this production's design violates that rigorous austerity. The raked stage is black. Black wedges stripped in metal press in on the sides. Huge vertical blocks stand at the back, swinging open heavily as the gates of Corioli or Rome. Soldier, patrician and apronman alike wear black. The women's gowns are grey. The effect is at once rich--and starved. Virgilia's flowing red hair stuns, like an icon, and banished Coriolanus appals when he stalks the length of the stage, armored now completely in red, deaf to Menenius.75

  A decade later Hands revisited the play in a less successful production with Charles Dance as Coriolanus. Dance lacked the compelling stage presence exhibited by Howard but perhaps the changing cultural context required a different focus. Opening in December 1989, a month after the fall of the Berlin Wall, military greatcoats seemed to glance toward events in Eastern Europe, but the production did not pick up on such resonances and only Peter Holland referred to them in his review: