CORIOLANUS at Stratford
There are three stars
in Stratford’s current production of William Shakespeare’s Coriolanus. Two of them are actors Lucy Peacock, as Coriolanus’s manipulative
mother Volumnia, and Tom McCamus as his staunch friend Menenius, each of whom is
delightfully at home in the prose. They make it both easy to understand and pleasurable
to listen to, far too great a rarity in much Shakespearean acting, whose peculiar
words and clunky phrasings can grate on our pop-culture-honed 21st-century
ears if not handled well.
The third star, of
course, is director Robert LePage’s set, with its mesmerising trompe-l’oeil staging.
The chimerical, visually rich effects include a real car, a Roman bathhouse, a
chic bar, a rainstorm, and texting soldiers, among other things, all of which
are dazzling. Still, one wonders, as with the live elephant in Aida, just how much of it is really necessary
and how much is there to make you forget that the play doesn’t quite live up to
expectations.
Strange to think that The Tragedy of Coriolanus is one of
Shakespeare’s later works, coming between such luminous plays as King Lear and The Tempest. It tells of the rise and fall of a Roman general,
Coriolanus, whose pride is his downfall as he attempts to enter the world of
politics. LePage is clearly making a statement about how media affects the
current state of world politics. Yet, while there is plenty of hubris, most
politicians today are far too canny about their PR to fall into Coriolanus’s
trap of being a good person who’s just too dumb to figure out how to work
things to his advantage.
I have long said that
LePage was the 20th-century Shakespeare—and now the 21st-century
Shakespeare—as much for his stunning reinvention of that writer’s works as for
his staging of everything he does, including his own work. What he was creating
a quarter century ago, others are just catching up with now. The (Ho-Hum) Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time, winner of all those
prestigious awards, owes more to LePage than any other stage director, living
or dead. His constant urge to reinvent is often in line with the needs of the
work, but occasionally shows them up, as in this case. What is needed here is
not more inventive staging, but a stronger play and a more charismatic lead to
make us like Coriolanus, despite his flaws.
While competent,
Shakespeare’s play Coriolanus seldom
rises above the merely perfunctory. It’s as though he had a mandate to fill—perhaps
a gambling bill to be paid off post-haste—and so needed to pump out yet another
work between masterpieces. We may never know, but it shows in the effort. Nevertheless,
we have LePage and Peacock and McCamus, all of whom make this particular
staging of it at Stratford more than worth the visit.
Jeffrey Round is the award-winning author of
thirteen books, including the Dan Sharp mystery series. His most-recent book is
the politically-themed thriller The God Game (Dundurn).
