Abstract
In June, the Shakespeare in the Park (New York City) production of Julius Caesar gained widespread attention (and that greatest of accolades, the opprobrium of Fox News) for apparently satirizing the Trump administration. Meanwhile, on this side of the pond, the Royal Shakespeare Company (RSC) was putting on a decidedly more ‘traditional’ togas-and-temples version which, for all its merits, seemed politically quiescent by comparison (see Cahiers Élisabéthains, 94, for reviews of the New York and RSC productions).
This Coriolanus could be seen as a riposte to accusations of political timidity. Its present-day setting, along with that of the concurrent staging of Titus Andronicus, may have militated against the aesthetic unity that had characterized the earlier part of the Roman season (although in the accompanying programme, director Angus Jackson does offer a rather convoluted account of how the disparate temporal locations were intended to convey the Roman Empire’s longevity). However, it did open up the possibility of relating the play’s conflict – between the primal codes of warfare and the equivocations of electioneering – to the concerns of the tumultuous present.
The key political preoccupations of the production seemed to be class warfare and populism, both revealed to be as enduring as the wars and lechery cited by Pandarus in Troilus and Cressida, and just as resistant to any easy resolution. In the programme, James Shapiro remarks, ‘Shakespeare can’t seem to make his mind up whether the people are a mob or an informed citizenry’, and this staging seemed unsure which side it should take, its political engagement thus being rendered essentially ambiguous.
The action began with a forklift truck shifting grain sacks behind a grille that represented the divide between the patricians and the plebeians. This separation was reinforced sartorially, as Menenius (played in an avuncular style by Paul Jesson) and Coriolanus (Sope Dirisu) entered in black tie to face the protesters, clad in jeans and hoodies. Volumnia’s (Haydn Gwynne) first appearance in her son and daughter-in-law’s lavish living room saw her sporting a white trouser suit – the outfit of one who needed to pay no attention to practicality.
There was therefore much to antagonize the famished citizens, but emphasis was placed on the fickle, inchoate and rudderless nature of their ire. They called to mind Jacques Lacan’s acid response to student protesters, ‘What you aspire to as revolutionaries is a master. You will get one’, and were ripe for exploitation. Their ‘master’ turned out to be two mistresses, with the tribunes being played by Jackie Morrison and Martina Laird. Their motivation was represented as class resentment, with their accents betraying humble origins and the thinly veiled hostility of their delivery of Act 4 Scene 2 hinting at the years of condescension they had suffered. The accent and appearance of Sicinius Veletus called to mind Scottish National Party leader Nicola Sturgeon (a connection made by several audience members discussing the production during the interval), and it was difficult not to perceive the spectre of Brexit haunting Jackson’s claim that the play explores the idea of direct democracy and ‘letting the people have what they want…regardless of the consequences’. The ambivalence of the director’s remarks was reflected in a production that seemed to grasp for contemporary political resonances without quite knowing what to make of the purchase that it found, although it could of course be argued, in line with Shapiro’s view cited above, that it thereby faithfully reproduced the play’s inherent ambiguity.
Coriolanus is notoriously unable to grasp the people’s responsiveness to simplistic but emotionally appealing populist rhetoric, and Gwynne’s delivery of 3.2.40 stressed the word ‘absolute’, locating the nub of the problem: Born into the life-or-death binarism of war, Coriolanus was baffled by the irreducibly relativistic nature of political discourse now enshrined in the grotesque paradoxes of ‘fake news’ and ‘alternative facts’. Coriolanus’ overt contempt for the emotional needs of the populace was signalled in a moment worthy of Lady Macbeth, as he frantically tried to rub out the damned spot that he had imagined had appeared on his hand after it had been sullied by contact with a plebeian.
There was perhaps a further political nuance lurking in the casting of a black actor in the lead role, following hot on the heels of the debate sparked by historian Mary Beard’s observations on the extent of racial and ethnic diversity in the Roman Empire (her account of the controversy can be found in the Times Literary Supplement: https://www.the-tls.co.uk/roman-britain-black-white/). Its significance was not made conspicuous, but ‘when my face is fair you shall perceive / Whether I blush or no’ (1.10.68–9) was treated as a joke shared with the soldiers, and it also gave an added, albeit anachronistic, bite to his furious reaction to being called ‘boy’ (5.6.103) by Tullus Aufidius (James Corrigan).
Much more overt was the persistent sexualization of Coriolanus. While he appeared stiff and awkward in his dinner jacket, he seemed to experience a sense of corporeal emancipation in conflict, his body shuffling off its besuited coil and relishing its oft-invoked bloodletting, sanguinary daubings accentuating its imposing musculature.
In this production, any sense of patriotic duty was sidelined: It was more evident that Coriolanus had a libidinal investment in war. His resulting battle scars were described with palpable erotic relish by Volumnia, and ‘we are to put our tongues into those wounds’ (2.3.7) was more than a mere figure of speech; her son’s wounds became, for her, ersatz erogenous zones. Reciprocating this perversity, Coriolanus grabbed and sucked at his mother’s breasts in an all-too-concrete incarnation of ‘Thy valiantness was mine, thou sucked’st it from me’ (3.2.129). Meanwhile, the rather flat and affectless performance of the admittedly thankless role of Virgilia by Hannah Morrish highlighted her marginal status, although there was an intriguing innovation in the suggestion that she suffered an Ophelia-like descent into madness, wandering off forlornly in the wrong direction before being dragged back home at the end of Act 4 Scene 1. The psychological toll exacted by Coriolanus’s exile was also manifest in Volumnia’s transformation from a voluminously coiffed power dresser to a bedraggled and gaunt supplicant.
The notion of Coriolanus having an Oedipal fixation with his mother (with the patria being the pater that must be destroyed) is hardly new, but a further level of counter-intuitive eroticism was adduced in the representation of the relationship between Coriolanus and Tullus Aufidius. When confronting each other in Act 1 Scene 9, they threw away their weapons and engaged in a somewhat homoerotic wrestling match, accompanied by an ethereal, sustained chord that would better suit an amorous encounter than a fight to the death.
The extent to which the supposed antagonists pined for each other was accentuated, and Coriolanus’s submission of himself to Tullus Aufidius’ authority in 4.5 was played almost as an erotic consummation: The latter’s comparison of his love for the exiled warrior to that he had for his wife (4.5.115–19) gained a particular frisson, and the Third Servingman’s account (4.5.196–207), delivered campily by Simon Yadoo, became a litany of double entendres. However, each man kills the thing he loves, and Aufidius’s eventual execution of Coriolanus was performed in sadomasochistic style, as he strangled him with a heavy chain amidst much quasi-orgasmic writhing and panting.
The decision to have the protagonist’s corpse carried off towards bright lights upstage alluded to a redemptive narrative that the role is barely able to sustain. Despite Dirisu’s often effective attempts to make his character more sympathetic than usual, the fact remains that the play is largely populated by deeply flawed individuals. In this production, Menenius stood out as a moral centre of gravity, struggling to reconcile Coriolanus’ unyielding sense of entitlement and the tribunes’ populist manipulations. The production sought to explore how this difficult drama can resonate with today’s benighted political environment, implying that then, as now, people perhaps get the leaders they deserve, and that their laments are as much to do with their own susceptibility as real acts of betrayal. In seeming to foreground Menenius, the staging seemed to offer a rather conservative message, promoting aristocratic rule with a human face over the misguided instincts of the demos and the misbegotten attempt to turn a warrior into a smooth political operator.
Carl von Clausewitz described politics as ‘the continuation of war by other means’, but this play begs to differ: Political life obeys its own rules, which are more treacherous and opaque than any military stratagem. What this production added to the mix was the notion that war is the continuation of sex by other means; to return to Pandarus, wars and lechery turn out to be two sides of the same coin – ‘and then men die’ (2.1.158).