Coriolanus

There are few things seemingly less suited to being enjoyed not live than theatre, which thrives on being seen as it unfolds, but in my flat we are turning these streams into a night out without the ‘out’ part. We’ve got a cheap old projector and, after moving furniture to clear some wall space, with a glass of wine and a bit of imagination, it just about works. I’ve also started to wait outside the bathroom for 20 minutes before I go to the loo, just for the full immersive experience. (Rebecca Nicholson, The Observer, 12 April 2020)

Nicholson’s humorous account of watching ‘live’ theatre under lockdown conditions is both wittily aware of the discomforts of the real thing and blithely unconcerned about the technological difficulties of home playback. Would that the technical exertions comprised only shunting furniture round and connecting ‘a cheap old projector’. In my house, there are two Kindles, two iPads, two (state of the art) MacBooks, one ‘smart’ and one ‘dumb’ mobile phone, a printer/scanner/fax machine, a large flatscreen Internet-enabled television, a Bluetooth external speaker, and enough connecting cables to encircle the globe six times! After a week of plugging this into that, unplugging it, connecting that into this, swearing loudly and explicitly, and vowing to live without the National Grid for the rest of my life, I eventually gave up all the techno and watched my first ever streamed theatre on a 10-inch screen with piddly speakers. Nicholson sounds like she enjoys the whole thing; apart from the ‘glass of wine’, I’ve yet to be converted.

Lockdown in the United Kingdom happened on 23 March 2020. The deadline for this review is 20 May. Within this eight-week period, I had tickets to see 11 theatre productions, including a couple of new plays at the National, Tom Stoppard’s latest offering, Leopoldstadt (Wyndham’s), two Pinters (you can’t have too much of a good thing): The Birthday Party (Cheltenham) and The Dumb Waiter (Hampstead). I also had tickets to see a production of Drunk Shakespeare (off-off-Broadway) and a stage adaptation of To Kill a Mockingbird (very much on Broadway but, obviously, my American flights went the same way as all these prospective theatre outings). I was also slated to review productions of Volpone (in Clapham) and The Tempest (Jermyn St). Suffice to say that I am an experienced theatregoer and I do well with Shakespeare in three dimensions.

I have also published a good deal about Shakespeare on film (Richard Eyre’s King Lear, Derek Jarman’s The Tempest, and Geoffrey Sax’s Othello) and – as I type this up – two sets of page proofs nestle in my ‘to do’ pile: one on the Roman Plays for Russell Jackson’s Cambridge Companion to Shakespeare on Screen, and the other on Tim Supple’s adaptation of Twelfth Night for Channel 4. Shakespeare in two dimensions doesn’t faze me.

But I find Shakespeare in one-and-a-half dimensions daunting – three dimensions (stage) compressed into two (screen) – induces the same kind of bewilderment as physicists discussing the space–time continuum, whatever that means, in infinite dimensions with all the alarming fluency of Stephen Hawking. Screened theatre is not a genre with which I’m experienced, and the comparative recency of live-streamed performances testifies to its novelty and intensifies my anxiety.

The overlapping circles of live theatre and recorded film produce a zone on the Venn diagram somewhere between the two, or rather, a zone where the two are superimposed. Some performance specialists have started to explore this new genre but the jury is still out on its merits and, for me at least, there remains a sense of ‘having to have been there’, to have been in the right place at the right time. Neil Allan has written elsewhere in this section about post-structuralism’s accusation of the fetishisation of the ‘original’ but I, for one, remain unconvinced.

Live theatre is, for me at least, the ‘spontaneous overflow of powerful feeling’ against which the recorded film version is merely the aftermath, the bit ‘recollected in tranquility’ as it were, secondary, somehow parasitic, almost, as it were, a kind of cheating.

On the contrary, it might be reasonably asserted that this view that elevates the theatre event over its filmed recollection maintains a theatrical elitism. Getting to a performance of Leopoldstadt in a reasonable seat will set you back £60 in addition to a prohibitively expensive hotel room and/or train fare from the provinces (assuming one lacks a London address). Screened theatre – often broadcast via the Internet for free or on a pay-what-you-want basis – widens the franchise and does away with any geographical, temporal, or financial limitations. It also allows multiple (infinite?) viewing opportunities, the chance to re-view and examine in detail the finest nuance of blocking, lighting, intonation, and so on.

But all this comes at the cost of theatre’s raison d’être: spontaneity. Perhaps an appropriate analogy would be the difference between the binding decision of the soccer referee – potentially unsighted, flustered, hurried and harried – and the cool deliberation of Video Assistant Referee (VAR), officially accepted by the International Football Association Board as recently as 2018. VAR may have the merit of resolving difficult situations and close calls but, according to its detractors, at the expense of making the game mechanistic and exempt from the idiosyncrasies of live sport. You have to be there, in the stadium, when an obvious penalty is disallowed, when a red card is entirely unjustified or, in the theatre, when the hacking off of Titus’s hand (played by Brian Cox in Deborah Warner’s 1987 Royal Shakespeare Company (RSC) production) caused a shower of ambient vomit and the passing out of three members of the audience, or when Clive Wood’s Duke of York, lamenting the death of Rutland (in Michael Boyd’s 2000 production), caused a member of the audience to cry out so loudly that the stage manager stopped the show, thinking that there was a medical emergency. (The chap was perched at the bar in the interval, right as rain.)

These exceptional, heart-stopping moments are outnumbered by the magnificence of thousands of emotionally engaging, tragical-comical-historical-pastoral performances – from recent memory, Glenda Jackson’s Lear, David Haig’s Player King in Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, Lisa Dwan’s performance of Beckett’s Not I, Cillian Murphy as the bereaved husband in the stage adaptation of Max Porter’s Grief Is the Thing with Feathers, Anamaria Marinca in Sarah Kane’s 4.48 Psychosis, or Kenneth Cranham in Florian Zeller’s The Father. These were performances of such audacity, delicacy, intensity, brutality, sensitivity, that they remain vividly in the memory long after their stage incarnation, and a recording would struggle to capture their infinite variety: three into two (dimensions) doesn’t go. Recordings of these (and I assume some exist) would reduce or at least condense them into portable, convenient but somehow less complicated, less animated experiences, the occasion absent, the uniqueness replaced by ubiquity – ‘hic et ubique?’ (Hamlet, 1.5.158).

The Donmar’s Coriolanus was quickly sold out and I never got to see it onstage but, even on the small screen, it made use of some powerful performances and stage images. Deborah Findlay’s Volumnia was manically obsessed by the delight of her son’s being wounded, cackling proudly over the number, location, and severity of such lacerations. The incestuous overtones of her ‘If my son were my husband…’ (1.3.2) were more than a little unsettling. The blank stare with which she contemplated the realisation that her intervention in the Volscian invasion had directly caused her son’s death was chilling, and as Tom Hiddleston’s Coriolanus, chained up by his ankles, bled out, she stood upstage stupefied and silent, witnessing the maternal damage she had caused. Mark Gatiss’s Menenius was a personable chappie, with thumbs in his waistcoat, ingratiating smile and waggish disposition. His allegory of the stomach was accompanied by his humorous patting of his paunch, and his description of the citizen as ‘the great toe of this assembly’ (1.1.153) was warmly affable rather than contemptuous.

The production also used some startling stage images, which, I suspect, might have been more efficacious in the theatre (since film can do all sorts of things with special effects that thus cease to be all that special). Most horrific was the suspension of Coriolanus by his ankles and the bleeding out of his body. As a gush of blood fell to the floor, Aufidius (Hadley Fraser) eagerly pushed his face under the shower in an extraordinary image of depravity and violence, vampirically opening his mouth not so much to ‘Wash [his] fierce hand in’s heart’ (1.11.27) but to gargle in its juices. This moment had an earlier, even more intensely bestial antecedent; as Coriolanus washed the butchery from his head and torso under a stream of water from above, he paused several times to shake his head rapidly, dog-like, to and fro, so that a spray of bloodied water shot from him in a deluge of gore. Both moments insisted on the feral inhumanity of governance rather than its skill or diplomacy.

As though to reinforce the connections between animal appetite and political power, the two tribunes were played by Elliot Levey (Brutus) and Helen Schlesinger (Sicinia) as an erotically involved couple. Brutus’s sinister plan to enrage Coriolanus and thereby alienate him from the plebes – ‘Put him to choler straight’ (3.3.25) – was immediately followed by a full kiss on Sicinia’s lips. Their rise to power was in part, Macbeth-like, a sexual turn-on.

Hiddleston’s protagonist was oafish from his first entrance, barging into a bystander with his opening words, ‘What’s the matter?’ (1.1.162). In general, Hiddleston’s performance was more robust in the warrior’s outbursts, and his explosion of rage before his exile was riveting. But he also mined the role’s milder interchanges, and his parting from his nearest and dearest, ‘Bid me farewell, and smile’ (4.1.51), was genuinely touching, with a lonesome salute directed downstage as his wife and mother stood behind him. As Aufidius greeted him with a full kiss on the lips, Coriolanus was frankly flabbergasted.

But, of course, it was in the final submission to his mother’s entreaties that the part requires most fragility, and Hiddleston ably discharged the burden of this moment. His face streamed with tears as he took Volumnia’s hand, ‘O mother, mother! / What have you done?’ (5.3.183–4), her face growing more aghast as he persuades her of the inevitability of his own ruination that will quickly follow.

Aufidius’s repentance – ‘My rage is gone, / And I am struck with sorrow’ (5.6.147–8) – that follows the slaughter of his nemesis, here, oddly, preceded it. ‘Let him die for’t’, in the text, spoken previously by the mob (120) immediately followed as a continuation of Aufidius’s speech. One wondered, if Aufidius were sorry, why go through with the murder? But perhaps – in this final sequence – the linear expectation of film trumped the theatricality of the spectacle of Aufidius, down on his knees receiving, full in the face, the spurting blood of his adversary like some perverted parody of transubstantiation – an obscenity worthy of the most sinister religious ritual. Here then, theatrical display seemed oddly out of kilter with the medium of film. While, without the recording and broadcast, this is a production I would have missed completely, I’m not at all convinced I can claim to have seen it – in any theatrical sense, that is.