Shakespeare’s Coriolanus is set in the fifth century BC, when the Roman republic was still finding its feet and struggling to achieve stability and identity. It’s a dark and bloody play.  

The Donmar Warehouse’s small stage is correspondingly dark, with little in the way of set or props, and subdued lighting that picks up the cool blues and violets of the sombre-toned costumes. Blood there is aplenty in early scenes, and red highlights throughout the play (a costume detail here, a floor marking there, a hail of ballot slips) keep the audience alert to ever-threatening violence.

In Josie Rourke’s fast-moving, unsentimental 2014 production, Tom Hiddleston’s Caius Martius Coriolanus is remarkable. For most of the play, Hiddleston’s agile, intelligent performance demonstrates his character’s deep unlikeability: his colossal vanity, coruscating anger, contempt for Rome’s starving poor and transparent dissembling to suit his purposes.  

Yet there are moments when he allows hints of softness to slip through, as when he asks for charity for a poor man who gave him shelter – even though he’s forgotten the poor man’s name, so his advocacy is futile.

Deborah Findlay plays his mother, Volumnia – a fearsomely doting patriot whose rigid devotion to Roman values of patriotism and family solidarity leads her to declare that “anger’s my meat” and that if she had a dozen sons she would rather have “eleven die nobly for their country than one voluptuously surfeit of out of action” and who hero-worships her only son as an architect of Rome’s glory.

Birgitte Hjort Sorensen is, visually and dramatically, an excellent foil for Findlay’s dark, voluble, substantial Volumnia. Her Virgilia, Coriolanus’ wife, is blonde, slighter, younger and more sympathetic, and the difference is enhanced because Shakespeare gives her fewer words to speak. Joe Willis, who looks as though he’s about seven or eight years old, plays the tiny part of Young Martius, Coriolanus’s son, to perfection.

Other performances of Roman characters are excellent too. Mark Gatiss’ Menenius, Coriolanus’ friend and advocate, has the assurance and authority of a rumpled academic, and Elliot Levey and Helen Schlesinger, as the dissenting people’s tribunes Brutus and Sicinia, clearly demonstrate the mix of idealism, expediency and self-interest that characterises many politicians today. Of note in a smaller role is Rochenda Sandall as First Citizen, exuding rage and disgust in a way that reminds me of protesters in the US and other countries this week.

Coriolanus’ nemesis and leader of the hated Volsces, Aufidius, is played by Hadley Fraser with pleasingly contrasting warmth and, interestingly, a slightly rustic air – you can imagine him ploughing a field or milking a cow.  He and the other Volscian characters are distinguished from the Romans by Yorkshire accents.

Throughout, contending themes of war and peace, personal rivalry, class struggle, family loyalty and interior conflict are all given their due and add texture to the story of the hero turned exile whose pride leads to disaster.

Best scenes? The sword fight between Martius (soon to be given the title of Coriolanus) and Aufidius – that confirms Martius’ status as a national hero and is a springboard to his brief, tumultuous political career – is only about three minutes long but deftly executed. Even more affecting are the final scenes in which Coriolanus cruelly rejects Menenius’ pleas for peace, only to be overcome by the women’s kneeling entreaties and, in the final, shocking minutes, for everything to be savagely overturned.  

See it while you can: Free on the National Theatre’s YouTube channel. Allow three hours, and make sure you start watching before 3am on Friday, 12 June. 

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Often when one of the Roman plays is on the boards the two standard questions are: is it in modern dress and what does it tell us about our current day politics? This staging of Coriolanus offers the twin answers no, and nothing at all.  

This is a highly personal voyage to the heart of a flawed individual: an obsessed Roman military aristocrat through and through. It is a tragedy in the sense that a virile and gifted man is brought down because of his inbred stiltedness.

The tragedy, such as that be, is that Coriolanus, the feral warrior, possesses no more human creativity than to heed advice from his would-be controlling mother that he should descend, as of right, into politics. In that alien world of fawning and back-slapping, being a valiant one-man killing machine is both his greatest power and his most debilitating weakness. You can’t help thinking he believes the Roman Empire would be a better place if they could just get rid of all the people who can’t supply an address.

The play is set in that hazy time of Rome’s semi-legendary past – around 500BCE. We are told that the devastated urban landscape is ‘a place calling itself Rome’.  This is not therefore the clean stone monolith that decorates the opening credits on Hollywood ‘swords and sandals’ epics. Smoke, social hatred, treacherous graffiti and the smell of fear hang heavy. This place is as murky as the tragic man himself.

Coriolanus (Tom Hiddleston) starts out as Caius Martius, yet to receive his titular name as the fruit of his profitably inspired fighting for Rome. No, this is the time pre-battle phase when the plebs were at their murmuring and starving worst. They show little enthusiasm for defending Rome even though the Volsci are looking to sack the city. The Roman scum are hungry and in fractious mood. Coriolanus admits no right on their part to either eat or live. They merely cheer the victories he risks his life for.  His contempt of them is more than just overt. His words are poisonous. We will compare them to the odious stink of the Roman fens. 

So in many ways the fighter is on his own facing the foe. Maybe that is why they called in an upcoming movie superhero in the form of Hiddleston – who has also lent a degree of acting credibility to the multiple Thor movies. If the Volsci are to be routed in this moment of supreme danger then Hiddleston will be the man to do it; if the mob don’t get him first. Hiddleston, with his controlled suavity than can rise into poetic fury, is just perfect in this role. 

This he achieves and in gut-wrenching style. The lively staging puts him front and centre and his animalistic forward surge makes you accept that everyone else there would be but a bit player of no ultimate importance. The image throughout is that of a semi-naked man who has dunked his head in a barrel of blood then gone off to eat the opposition for lunch. 

The battle honours are his but he is not loved, either by aristocrats or the battle fodder. His addiction to war at its most visceral throws into relief his utter lack of introspection: yang without yin; a man who is no more than a hammer marching through the world looking for nails.

His Spartan-like but adoring mother Volumnia (toweringly though sensitively played by acting dark horse Deborah Findlay) intrigues to steer him into high Roman politics when clearly he lacks qualification. He shows no relish for stroking the masses, majestically feeding them bread and supplying wine and games.  Hiddleston’s Coriolanus is certainly a man not born to debase himself purely to acquire a consul’s robes. “I think he’ll be to Rome as is the osprey to the fish, who takes it by sovereignty of nature”. In time mother has the internal resources to relent, son does too (only for mother) but way too late.

He is, though, happily married to Virgilia, a role once described as “perhaps the loveliest” of Shakespeare’s female characters; possessing “modest sweetness, conjugal tenderness, and fond solicitude”. No Lady Macbeth here.  She displays a proud but unselfish love for Coriolanus. Were she to be like Volumnia the play could not stand the deficit of softness that would bring. Virgilia gives as much by her noble silence as her uplifting presence. She is the cause of her husband’s few moments of tenderness. Birgitte Hjort Sorensen plays that nicely with Scandinavian cool and but a vague hint of sex appeal.  

But Coriolanus is, at bottom, a solo good-soldier act and ’ere long it all brings him career-ending banishment from Rome through those trade union conniving Tribunes of the Plebs (Rochenda Sandall, Dwane Walcott and Mark Stanley) – but wait!  Hiddleston’s hero is a born harbinger of destruction. Like the legendary Otago prop that has to be turned around at half time by the coach so that he plays in the right direction in the second half, Coriolanus can both defend Rome or attack it – should he so choose.

So after being noisily exiled, Coriolanus seeks out his admired former enemy Aufidius (Hadley Fraser, in arse-end-of-Manchester mode) at Antium (“Were I anything but what I am, I would wish me only he.”) As a relaxing conversation opener he first invites Aufidius to kill him – just to get back at Rome. This man is driven is he not?

Aufidius (“A lion I would be proud to hunt”) somewhat perversely adopts Coriolanus as a powerful new general, ready to join him in leading a new assault on Rome in Volsci colours. Their overtly homo-erotic meeting in the shadows also has elements of “when the Beatles met Elvis”. It is, however, treason by a patrician and cannot end well.  Coriolanus is now a bloodstained tragedy waiting to happen.

Rome, in its panic, tries desperately through a commendably plausible Menenius to persuade Coriolanus to halt any crusade for vengeance, but fails. Finally, Volumnia is sent to meet her son, along with Coriolanus’s wife Virgilia and their young boy. Volumnia succeeds in dissuading her son from destroying Rome, and Coriolanus instead concludes a peace treaty between the Volscians and the Romans. When Coriolanus returns to the Volscian capital, conspirators, organised by Aufidius, kill him for his betrayal of – well, by that time, just about everybody.

Unlike other Shakespearian tragedies, Coriolanus offers little surrounding plot contexts or depths of story. Events proceed in a set and implacable way. Coriolanus gets his come-uppance via a tortured route but assassination is always, all hero worship aside, on the cards. It was the microbes that killed the Martians in The War of the Worlds and it is the repellent lower orders that do for this man of “dangerous stubbornness” in the end. (The microbes were a much bigger surprise.)

Despite Coriolanus’s dominance of the piece the Bard perversely created an “out of focus man” – one who is hard to grasp. You can’t put your finger on him “He had, sir, the kind of face methought I cannot tell how to term it.” He morphs into chameleon-like poses as the play progresses. Mulishly fixed he may be but nobody really has him for long. Hiddelston manages to be both memorably handsome and blurringly unknowable.

The other characters, in contrast, are sharp and eminently serviceable in progressing the plot. Mark Gatiss as the plebs-indulgent Menenius is a glib Roman strutter and a consistent mediator when talking back the mob, and while seeking to soothe and haul back Coriolanus from the abyss. The upbeat mother Volumnia (so politically proud early on of her son’s seventeen bankable battle wounds) desperately brings to bear all her sincere womanly wiles once her son goes over to the dark side. She both succeeds and fails.

This is a first rank production for many reasons. The staging is minimalist and non-distracting, being both theme and actor friendly. It can be sketched out as basic chairs and ladders (the Tribunes use the chairs so, maybe, snakes and ladders are suggested) along with painting the set on the floor in a series of squares and oblongs within which the hero angrily paces in his compressed mental world. The sight of Hiddleston doing an athletic one man ‘swarm’ up a ladder into the dazzlingly lit flies, where the battle really is, grabs the character in one. The rest cringe on the floor while Hiddleston speedily ascends into immortality. This victory is his personal apogee.

The onstage violence is brutal in flashes (as when Coriolanus is mockingly executed by Aufidius) but more generally is sustained through carefully modulated sound. Overall, this a fine effort. The dialogue is often softly interpersonal and restrained in delivery but it explodes in the Senate, with Hiddleston especially good at rapper-like body language. His sparring with the plebs make the very most of some cogent prose on all sides. The dramatic tension between irreconcilable groups is left smouldering throughout, despite the largely foregone nature of the storyline. Interest never lags, either visually or intellectually. 

I have viewed many of the National Theatre pieces since Lockdown began. This one hits the mark by expertly integrating sound, sightlines, sets and bringing overall coherence to volatile scenes. Director Josie Rourke has hit the nail splendidly. She and her team (Designer Lucy Osborne and Lighting/Sound Designers Mark Henderson and Emma Laxton, Michael Bruce with dramatically effective music) have authored a totally clear tale; one that preserves the untidy feel of theatre/ audiences while taming both the pitfalls of film and our limited television screens, where such semi-epics so often falter. This a major effort to boost a minor piece, one in which the two and a half hours do not drag for a single moment. 

Free on the National Theatre’s YouTube channel

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