And Rosmersholm Makes Five

Coriolanus
Royal Shakespeare Company
The Observer

Ibsen usually gets higher marks than Shakespeare as a craftsman, but if Rosmersholm is the attempt, Coriolanus (Stratford) is the deed; and equally likely to confound its interpreters. A play so perfectly proportioned, so devoid of overflow, presents an unfriendly prospect. The central scenes of conflict between plebeians and patricians are an unravelled dramatic picture of a society on the move, but the mass and energy of the text all too often contract and evaporate in the theatre. Terry Hands’s production draws a neat diagram of the conflict, but turns a ‘mutiny’ into a scrap. Perhaps the trouble is simply lack of manpower; anyway the production style is compact, typified by the presentation of the opening crowd as an orderly phalanx. 

The play is ensconced in a familiar RSC mould (leathery costumes by Farrah) and Alan Howard’s Coriolanus is a natural extension of his Henry V. From a man striving to turn himself into a war machine, he has become a war machine: also, and I mean no disparagement, a rhetoric machine. His clangorous tones are exactly tuned to this play’s particular music, and some of his special effects—the echoing taunt of ‘Your voices,’ the incredulous long-draw ‘sh’ with which he picks up the presumptuous tribune’s ‘Shall’—are thrilling, ingenious and appropriate. 

One misses the excitement (as in Nicol Williamson’s Coriolanus or Mr. Howard’s own Henry VI) of an actor going out to meet a role, and finding himself in the process, but that is the penalty of ideal casting. I have only two major cavils: (a) he fails to differentiate civilian whom he brilliantly embodies in Rome; (b) he gives little sign of the psychological wound that exposes him to his mother’s entreaties—and Maxime Audley’s Volumnia is not of sufficient stature to do the job alone. 

The other actors group themselves round the leading man as the other characters round the hero. Jeffrey Dench’s Cominius keeps an honest respectable distance, Graham Crowden’s Menenious, though he scants on the urbanity (which could be a director’s touch), still gets insinuatingly close; only Julian Glover’s Aufidius seems disposed to set up in competition, and, though commanding, he is canny enough to stay in his own less elevated yard. The tribunes, Tim Wylton and (especially good) Oliver Ford-Davies, go their own way, coolly toppling the protagonist before themselves succumbing to inflation.