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by William Shakespeare, directed by Antoni Cimolino

Stratford Festival, Festival Theatre, Stratford

May 29-September 23, 2006

“Two Great Performances in a Bazaar”

The Stratford Festival’s fourth production of Shakespeare’s political tragedy “Coriolanus” features superb performances by Colm Feore in the title role and by Martha Henry as Volumnia, the hero’s martial mother.  The two create the clearest depiction of this complex mother and son relation that I’ve seen.  How disappointing then that Santo Loquasto’s design is so confusing that even those familiar with the play will have trouble following the action.

Shakespeare took the subject for his final tragedy from Plutarch “Lives” set in a period about 500 years before Julius Caesar.  The play explores one of Shakespeare’s favourite structures--a battle between two worlds each divided within itself.  Rome and Antium are at war but within each country there is tension between the nobility and the common people.  Coriolanus is a man born and bred to martial action but who cannot disguise his disdain for the plebs, a ploy necessary if he is to become a consul as his powerful mother wishes.  His personality, so heroic in battle but so unsuited to politics, makes Coriolanus one of Shakespeare’s clearest examinations of the tragic character. 

Colm Feore, who so easily communicates hauteur and egotism, is an ideal Coriolanus.  He is far more effective than was Tom McCamus in 1997 or Len Cariou in 1981.  He shows us a hero whose vigour and selflessness find their natural outlet in battle.  In peacetime he visibly chafes against the restraints of domesticity and the dissembling required in politics.  When Coriolanus is forced by custom to show is wounds to the populace, Feore makes us feel his mortification that goes a long way toward garnering our sympathy for this usually unsympathetic tragic figure.  Coriolanus as a man of action is a kind of anti-Hamlet and so has very few speeches of reflection.  These few, however, director Antoni Cimolino and lighting designer Gil Wechsler have visually isolated and highlighted so that we get the sense of a man aware of his nature and of his inability to change it.  Feore’s insightful reading of Coriolanus’ speeches show clearly, for once, how this figure relates to Shakespeare’s sequence of great tragic characters.

Martha Henry, who had to suffer innumerable directorial impediments in Richard Rose’s ill-conceived production in 1997, now has the chance to revel in the full complexity of Volumnia.  On the one hand, she is the model Roman matron for whom honour is the supreme virtue.  Henry makes clear how her son’s love of violence and disdain for the “rabble” derive from her.  Yet, on the other hand Henry shows how Volumnia lives so vicariously through her son that her she can’t see that her political ambitions for him not only contradict his nature but will inevitably bring him to ruin.  In the masterful scene where Volumnia goes to Antium and pleads with the exiled Coriolanus to make peace with Rome, the exultation in Henry’s face painfully contrasts with the pall of doom that covers Feore’s.

The rest of the cast is uneven.  Best are Don Carrier and especially Bernard Hopkins as the Roman tribunes Sicinius and Brutus, who stir up the plebeians’ wrath again Coriolanus more to boost their own power than to right any wrongs.  Paul Soles is keen to make a lovable comic character of Coriolanus’ mentor Menenius, but he and director Cimolino miss the full tragic impact of Coriolanus’ rejection of him at the end.  Soles also is so given to mumbling that the import of Menenius’ famous parable of the body in Act 1 goes missing.  As Coriolanus’ trusty friends Cominius and Lartius, Stephen Russell and Roy Lewis are forceful and well-spoken.  Robert King turns in a fine comic portrait of the Third Citizen blissfully unaware that he contradicts himself whenever he speaks.

The greatest disappointment is Graham Abbey as Coriolanus’ Volscian rival and later ally Tullus Aufidius.  Abbey communicates neither the menace nor the cunning that Scott Hylands did so powerfully in 1981.  The two archenemies are supposed to be equals, but Abbey fades into the woodwork.  As for the women, Nicolá Correia-Damude does little to make Coriolanus’ wife Virgilia more than a weepy non-entity and Keira Loughran speaks Shakespeare’s sinewy verse as if it were modern prose.

With such strong performances from Feore and Henry all would be well, but the bizarre choices of designer Santo Loquasto undo all the clarity the two actors create.  In their programme notes Cimolino says he wanted to set the play in its historical period (i.e., about 500 BC) while Loquasto says he wants to avoid a “toga party”.  The result is a design that does not reflects 6th century BC at all but looks more like a medieval bazaar.  The Roman senators are dressed like Jewish high priests, while the people look like Afghani peasants.  Even stranger, the two tribunes are garbed as Catholic clerics.  When fighting the Romans don jackboots and Nazi-style helmets.  Over in Antium, Aufidius sports a modern upper arm tattoo, the senators and servingmen look like a delegation to the Starship Enterprise and the Volscian people are dressed as Berbers.  Coriolanus’ costumes change from black at the beginning to--guess what?--a white toga at the end for “symbolic” reasons known only to Loquasto and, since he had to approve it, Cimolino.

With so many speaking parts it’s important to keep things clear.  The Romans must look different from the Volscians in one general way, not in several different ways.  We have to know whether the director thinks the two societies are mirror images of each other, if the Romans are more advanced than the Volscians or vice versa.  Cimolino and Loquasto don’t seem to know.  Within each nation we have to be able to tell the class of the citizens easily since that is so much a part of the play.  To have them all appear to be from different ethnic groups hopelessly confuses the issue.

At the end when the Volscian populace is supposed to tear Coriolanus limb from limb, Cimolino substitutes a special effect--what seems to be a robot carcass with gas jets protruding from it meant, no doubt to recall a similar image used at the start of the play.  The play already implies a circular structure and does not need such reinforcing especially when the burning prop distracts us from the final words of the play.

Colm Feore and Martha Henry may be the best Coriolanus and Volumnia you will ever see.  Alone and together they reveal the greatness that lies in this difficult work.  It’s a great pity their performances should have to struggle against such muddled directorial and design decisions.           

©Christopher Hoile

Note: This review is a Stage Door exclusive.

Photo: Colm Feore, Stephen Russell and Paul Soles. ©David Hou.