Nine years ago, rising star director Lyndsey Turner tried her hand at blockbuster Shakespeare when she helmed the Barbican’s Benedict Cumberbatch-starring production of Hamlet. And it was aggressively okay: visually ravishing, and a big hit, but a fairly shallow take on arguably the deepest work in the entirety of English literature.
Coriolanus is the first Shakespeare play Turner has directed since, and she’s clearly learned a few tricks over the last decade, because this is tremendous.
And indeed, while Hamlet designer Es Devlin is back to conjure a slickly anachronistic mishmash of ancient and modern worlds – men battle with swords in rooms that look like a cross between the British Museum and a Grand Designs property – this is not a show that coasts on spectacle.
Psychology is the thing, and jacked Hollywood star David Oyelowo is wonderful as Gnaeus Marcius Coriolanus, the stacked Roman general who turns on Rome after its people reject him.
It’s not a play that’s done a huge amount, and in the highly entertaining last major London production, Tom Hiddleston took the popular path and portrayed Coriolanus as an inveterate snob, whose downfall comes from a genuine contempt for the common people of Rome.
Oyelowo’s general is more complicated than that. As a minimum it’s clear that part of reason Coriolanus is so difficult a character is that he is deeply traumatised from the many wars he’s fought for the Roman republic. Now striving for the senior political rank of consul, he finds the tradition that involves him showing his war wounds – all 27 of them – to the public ahead of their endorsement deeply upsetting. It’s not that he sees it as beneath him: it’s that he flinches at the very idea of strangers seeing his damaged body.
Is he kind of a dick too? I mean, yes: there is no denying that he takes a very dim view of the man on the street. He thinks Rome should be ruled by its nobles alone, and not have to pander to regular citizens and their political representatives the tribunes. But Oyelowo’s Coriolanus isn’t some conceited toff who loftily monologues his contempt for the little guy. There is something unusual about his coldness, his lack of empathy, his total inability to read the room when it comes to niceties. When he talks enthusiastically of locking swords with his nemesis Tullus Aufidius (Kobna Holdbrook-Smith), you sense that he finds this form of relationship more meaningful than conventional human interactions. While I wouldn’t say Oyelowo and Turner are actively trying to make some grand statement on neurodivergence, I think Coriolanus’s behaviour is on the whole only explicable as either ‘deranged toff’ or ‘man who is wired differently’, and here it’s very much a case of box B.
And you can’t underestimate the role played by his mother Volumina. Pamela Nomvete is magnificently formidable here: when she speaks about Coriolanus, she sounds like a stony faced Trump-supporter talking up her guy, not a loving mother. For his part, Oyelowo’s fearless general cringes in the face of Nomvete’s hard-faced matriarch. It is abundantly clear from her faintly terrifying delivery of the line ‘There's one thing wanting, which I doubt not but our Rome will cast upon thee’ that the wheeze of him becoming a consul is entirely her plan. Which makes it all the sadder, a true tragedy rather than simply the story of a man too obnoxious to live. Whatever special characteristics make this Coriolanus a great general leave him unable to relate to his fellow men. Jordan Melcalfe and Stephanie Street’s civil servant-style tribunes are cruel in their torpedoing of his consulship – but is also abundantly clear that Coriolanus is not suited to political office. When he defects to Tullus’s side to avenge his humiliation, there’s the sense that he doesn’t quite get why this is so beyond the pale, and that he has once again failed to read the room with regards to his new allies.
Coriolanus is, above all, a play about politics and the need to keep the people on your side no matter how cynically. But here it’s supercharged by an outstanding central performance that deftly walks the line between sympathetic and repellant. The play lags when Coriolanus is off the stage, and the late team-up with Tullus is undercooked. Nonetheless, I thought Turner’s production took all this in its stride. Courser, weirder and less introspective than Shakespeare’s other great protagonists, I get why Coriolanus isn’t done so often, but this take really cracks it open, a clear view into a troubled soul.