A Soldier To Cry On





By Susannah Clapp
Observer
Theatre
June 18, 2000



Ralph Fiennes is a repellent Coriolanus, Barbara Jefford riveting as his tyrant mother - when you can hear them

Coriolanus
Gainsborough, London N1


Anyone who wants to see a great Shakespearean actor should go to Jonathan Kent's production of Coriolanus. The Almeida's tenancy of the beautiful, derelict Gainsborough Studios has been presented as a Ralph Fiennes season. But it is Barbara Jefford - who first appeared in a Shakespeare play over 50 years ago - who causes the audience to be rapt. As the tyrant mother Volumnia - the person who taught Coriolanus how to bully - she uncoils herself to assume an easy grandeur of gesture. She is statuesque. She uses the verse like a knife. She subdues the vast space of this stage - just as she does her whimpering son.

The Almeida are having an imaginative sojourn in Shoreditch. They have linked two of Shakespeare's least cajoling plays - Richard II and Coriolanus - and established a kinship between them. Both plays deal with men who are ill-equipped for power; both these men have rivals who can be seen as echoes. In both cases, these second selves have been played with admirable tautness by Linus Roache. And in both cases they have proved that Ralph Fiennes is a bold actor.

Fiennes has made both his characters repellent. He might have been expected to be a melancholy, brooding Richard: instead, he was spiky. He might have been expected to smoulder as Coriolanus, but he plays him like a teenager trying out a series of different parts: he's in turn headstrong, petulant and scornful. He pretends to be a baby with silly walks and mocking voices - and then breaks down into real babyish tears.

This intricate unpacking of a part - nearly always full-face to the audience as if this were his looking glass - is always intelligent, but better suited to the self-conscious, self-regarding Richard II than to Coriolanus. This is a play which has been seen as an argument for revolution and as an argument against it. It has no point of rest, no haven of sympathy. It snarls in all directions. Its lack of certainty can make it seem peculiarly modern. It doesn't seem so here.

Too much of this production is smudged. The staging is full of big effects, some of them tremendous. In Paul Brown's design, the jagged lightning fissure which splits the rough brick wall at the back of the stage becomes filled with smoke; the glass floor of the stage turns blood-red after battle; a massive, rusty gate clangs down like a guillotine. But a lot of the verse can't be heard. A lot of it is bellowed. There's a miasma of muttering, and a roaring, sword-waving way of going on. The crowd is a weeny huddle of blokes energetically pretending to be poor people. Despite the flares of excitement which are sent up, it's a production which lacks a sense of an outside world and of political consequence.

 

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