CORIOLANUS AT STRATFORD

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 21^st-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 20^th-century Shakespeare—and now the 21^st-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).