Reviews 2018
Reviews 2018
✭✭✭✩✩
by William Shakespeare, directed by Robert Lepage
Stratford Festival, Avon Theatre, Stratford
June 22-November 3, 2018;
Hopkins Center, Darmouth College, Hanover, NH
November 29-December 2, 2018
Coriolanus: “There is a world elsewhere”
Robert Lepage’s production of Shakespeare’s Coriolanus is dazzlingly cinematic if self-indulgent, but his change to the play’s ending and other excisions of key characters demonstrate that he has virtually no understanding of the central issues of the play. His extensive use of projections, animation and computerized sets provide elaborate settings for a play that originally would have been performed on an empty stage. All of the indications for location and time are already part of Shakespeare’s text and have no need be so minutely rendered. As a result, Lepage’s production does not really present a modern approach to Shakespeare so much as a Victorian one where the audience has to search among all the unnecessary bric-à-brac of Lepage’s set designs to focus on the actors and their words.
Lepage has had designer Steve Blanchet create a separate stage machine set on the stage and within the proscenium of the Avon Theatre. It is several feet back from the edge of the stage and creates a narrow playing area in front that Lepage uses only once during the show. Otherwise, all the action takes place in the stage machine that has two stage-width horizontal shutters and two stage-height vertical shutters. When not in motion they form a four-foot-wide black border on each side of the stage machine’s opening with a black top border that reaches past the proscenium. Throughout the action we are thus forced to look at a very small area within the natural stage opening of the Avon. Except for two boxes that mostly represent rooms in the Senate, all the sets are created through Pedro Pires’s projections given some three-dimensionality through Ariane Sauvé’s props. The show thus uses highly artificial means to create a hyper-realistic design.
The show’s general ethos of production for production’s sake starts right at the beginning when Lepage decides to have an oversized bust of Coriolanus “speak” the character’s first words in the play by means of an animated projection. This draws excited gasps from some of the audience, but for others it feels as if we’ve entered some sort of Disney World version of history.
Treating the play as a film might serve a purpose if it had some interpretative function, but here it does not. If Lepage means it to be a film noir, why doesn’t he present it in black and white? There is a famous film noir about a mother-obsessed gangster, Raoul Walsh’s White Heat (1949), that Lepage could have used as a model if he had wanted to, but the way Lepage cinematizes the play does nothing to make its meaning clearer. The aspect ratio of the stage opening of Lepage’s stage-upon-the stage is 2:66, about the same as for CinemaScope, but Lepage does not imagine Coriolanus as an classical movie epic that would suit that ratio, but rather as a series of intimate scenes in interiors, not in the open public places Shakespeare suggests.
Shakespeare’s play, following his source in Plutarch’s Parallel Lives, takes place in the legendary history of Rome before and after the Roman conquest of the town of Corioli in 493bc. At this early date Rome, capital of Latium, occupied only one small part of the Italian peninsula. Rome had many enemies of which the Volscians were the fiercest. The play shows how Rome’s bravest warrior Gaius Marcius single-handedly takes the Volscian city of Corioli and thus earns his cognomen “Coriolanus”. Shakespeare thus presents us with a vision of a divided world as he does so often in his plays, whether it is Athens and the enchanted forest in A Midsummer Night’s Dream (1595) or Sicilia and Bohemia in A Winter’s Tale (1610).
This aspect of the play Lepage understands. What he fails to understand is that the divisions within each of these realms are just as important. The Romans as well as the Volscians are divided by class into patricians and plebeians. Only with his initial radio show scene does Lepage mention the volatile situation in Rome between these two classes. He then drops it in favour of focussing on the machinations of the two tribunes of the plebeians, Sicinius and Junius Brutus, to increase their power. To them Coriolanus is their greatest enemy because the common people so love his bravery they ignore Coriolanus’ undisguised disdain for them.
The fact that there is a Volscian mob is crucial to understanding the play. When the tribunes manage to have Coriolanus banished from Rome, Coriolanus famously declares, “There is a world elsewhere”. The enormous irony of this statement is that the world of the Volscians is structured just the same way as Rome is.
Lepage’s altering of the ending makes nonsense of the play’s theme of the antagonistic relationship of the hero to the people. Throughout the play, Lepage suggests that the Volscians’ great hero Aufidius, who admires Coriolanus and is admired by him, is in a homosexual relationship with his unnamed Lieutenant. When Coriolanus turns to Aufidius after his banishment from Rome, Lepage has Aufidius greet him with an ardour that far surpasses mere admiration. To underscore the point, Lepage, in an added scene, shows how resentful the Lieutenant is at being neglected in favour of Rome’s great hero.
At the end of the play, Lepage shows that Aufidius and his Lieutenant have been sleeping together in the same hotel bed. When Coriolanus arrives brandishing the peace treaty he has devised between the Romans and Volscians, Lepage scandalously omits the Volscian mob and their reactions: “Tear him to pieces”. “Do it presently”. “He kill’d my son”. “My daughter’. “He killed my cousin Marcus”. “He killed my father”. Instead of having Aufidius’ men kill Coriolanus and the mob tear his body to pieces, Lepage has Aufidius’ jealous Lieutenant kill Coriolanus on his own. Not only does this action destroy that parallelism that Shakespeare has carefully created between the Roman and the Volscian mobs, it completely trivializes Coriolanus’ death. Coriolanus’ assumption of his superiority to the common people is his fatal flaw. To have him die because of his enemy’s lover’s jealousy in no way makes sense of the play, its central character or its concerns.
The main surprise in a show that is more about directorial exhibitionism than storytelling is how good the acting is across the board. André Sills is both electrifying and sympathetic as Coriolanus, a man who is only one thing, a warrior, and knows he can be nothing else. Coriolanus is a kind of anti-Hamlet. Whereas Hamlet is all self-analysis and no action, Coriolanus is all action with no self-analysis. This makes him unique among Shakespeare’s tragic heroes, and yet Sills is able to show that Coriolanus is aware of his limitations even if he is unable to articulate them. Sills carefully escalates the anger in Coriolanus caused when Menenius and Volumnia try to force him to be a politician rather than a fighter. When the Senate banishes him, his shout, “I banish you!” sounds more fateful than triumphant.
Graham Abbey is excellent as Aufidius, Coriolanus’ Volscian counterpart. Whereas Coriolanus is neither reflective nor wily, Aufidius is both. As per Lepage’s direction Abbey further distinguishes Aufidius as a warrior who derives erotic pleasure in battling so fierce an enemy whereas Sills’ Coriolanus merely relishes fighting with someone he considers his equal.
Tom McCamus is a fine Menenius, wise with age, who can see through the scheming of the two tribunes. He is the voice of reason throughout the play. As a result, McCamus makes Menenius’ rejection by Coriolanus in Antium feel not only like a personal humiliation but a fatal turn in the drama towards Coriolanus’ self-destruction.
The the two tribunes Junius Brutus and Sicinius, Stephen Ouimette and Tom Rooney are almost comically interchangeable. Given how Lepage has cut their roles, their self-serving plotting against Coriolanus has lost the ambiguity it would have if the two had been allowed more contact with the angered common people they represent.
Lucy Peacock plays Volumnia as a grande dame of Rome who is as contemptuous of the lower classes as her son. Indeed, we can see that Coriolanus’ negative qualities derive directly from her. Yet, her ambition for her son to be a Senator shows that she is living through a son whose limitations she does not fully comprehend. In an well-considered production of the play, Volumnia’s reckless ambition for her son and her lashing out at the tribunes would not be comic but disturbing, but Lepage is unable to direct Peacock to suppress the histrionics that can make her Volumnia seem more a fool than an indomitable force.
In smaller roles, Alexis Gordon manages to give Coriolanus’ wife Virgilia her own personality, which can too often be suppressed by Volumnia’s dominance. Michael Blake also helps to bring the character of the commander Cominius out of the shadows and make his laments about the changing situation in Rome into a commentary on the loss of the city’s honour. Aufidius’s Lieutenant, as noted above, is not Aufidius’ gay lover in Shakespeare’s play. Therefore, Johnathan Sousa has to rely not on the text but on silent looks and gestures to communicate his attraction to Aufidius and the depths of his anger at being rejected by him, he thinks, in favour of Coriolanus. This he does so well that he makes Lepage’s added subtext both subtle and clear.
Stratford stages Coriolanus only once in every twelve years, the last time in 2006, so it is a pity that it should be presented this time in so self-involved a production that neglects the essence of the play’s structure and the nature of Coriolanus’ tragedy. People will be impressed with shiny, glittering things and so they will be with Lepage’s cinematic production. Yet, those who know the play will see that beneath its dazzling surface, the production is empty and wilfully or accidentally misunderstands the play. Simply think of Coriolanus as Shakespeare’s response to Hamlet and you will see the overabundance of Lepage’s missed opportunities. Let’s hope that the next time Stratford presents this complex, fascinating play it finds a director interested in the play itself rather than in flaunting his love for technological effects.
©Christopher Hoile
Note: This review is a Stage Door exclusive.
Photos: (from top) Alexis Gordon, Oliver Gamble, Johnathan Souza, Lucy Peacock, Farhang Ghajar, Graham Abbey and André Sills; André Sills as Coriolanus; Johnathan Sousa as Lieutenant and Graham Abbey as Aufidius; Emilio Vieira as Roman and Farhang Ghajar as Volsce; André Sills as Coriolanus driving to Antium. ©2018 David Hou.
For tickets, visit www.stratfordfestival.ca.
2018-07-18
Coriolanus