There is a world elsewhere
Strong revivals abound as Coriolanus and Dido complete the RSC’S Rome season and the National Theatre’s Oslo resonates with current global instability
THE play Coriolanus means different things at different times. In 1930s Germany, the hero was seen as a glamourised Führer; in the 1950s, to a Marxist like Bertolt Brecht, it was a tragedy about the ‘individual’s indispensability’. However, it is difficult to see any strong political line in Angus Jackson’s Stratford revival, which com- pletes the RSC’S quartet of Roman plays. The production is clear and fastmoving, but better on psychology than politics.
It starts with the potent image of corn stashed behind an iron fence, a reminder of the Midland riots triggered by bad harvests in 1607 and that the Roman populace had a genuine grievance against the grain-hoarding ruling class. After that, the modern-dress production settles into a traditional clash between an arrogant, militaristic hero and an easily manipulated mob.
Where it scores is in its picture of personal relationships. Compared to great past performances —Laurence Olivier, Alan Howard, Ian Mckellen—sope Dirisu’s Coriolanus often seems vocally rigid and inflexible, but he brings out the hero’s fatal dependence on his mother and his homoerotic attachment to his military opposite, Aufidius.
Mr Dirisu gives a perfectly decent performance, but the strength of the production lies in Haydn Gwynne as an unusually young-looking Volumnia, superb in her final return to Rome; James Corrigan’s Aufidius catching the love-hate attitude to Coriolanus; Paul Jesson’s Menenius, worshipping the emotionally arrested hero; and Tony Boncza, who makes his mark as a camp Volscian servant. The production is bold and lucid, but without stirring the blood in the way great revivals can.
I got more pleasure out of the revival of Marlowe’s rarely seen
Dido, Queen of Carthage at Stratford’s Swan. It’s part of the Rome season, to which it has a somewhat tenuous connection in that Aeneas ultimately deserts Dido in order to pursue his mission to found the imperial city, but I was excited by Kimberley Sykes’s production, her RSC debut, for several reasons. It gives full value to the melodic cadence of Marlowe’s verse where Dido says of Aeneas: ‘He’ll make me immortal with a kiss.’ Played on Ti Green’s sand-covered surface, it’s full of exotic images and haunting music and Chipo Chung as Dido gives a performance that suggests she could play Cleopatra—she shows infinite variety and is capable of simultaneously sabotaging Aeneas’s ships and expressing undying love for him.
If the RSC is rapidly becoming our main repository of classical drama, the National is vividly contemporary. J. T. Rogers’s Oslo, now transferred to the Harold Pinter Theatre, is a spellbinding account by an American dramatist of the back-channel talks that led, in 1993, to a fragile Israelipalestinian rapprochement and the sight of Rabin and Arafat shaking hands on the White House lawn.
The drama lies in the detail. We see the mixture of diplomacy and deceit that a Norwegian sociologist and his wife deployed to initiate the Oslo meetings: there’s a wonderful moment when Toby Stephens as Terje Rød-larsen lies through his teeth, and risks his wife’s reputation, to persuade a Palestinian that the Israelis are prepared to upgrade the talks.
The play also vindicates Larsen’s belief that the key to success lies in gradualism and grounded human relationships. Peter Polycarpou as the PLO representative and Philip Arditti as his Israeli opposite number are superb in suggesting that behind their macho bluster lies a growing personal regard that enables agreement to be reached. Finely directed by Bartlett Sher, it’s a fascinating play that couldn't be more timely with world peace looking so fragile.
Alongside our national companies, I’d like to pay tribute to Northern Broadsides, touring with
For Love Or Money, an adaptation by Blake Morrison of a 1709
‘The production is bold and lucid, but without stirring the blood
French comedy, Turcaret, by Alain-rené Lesage. The company was created by Barrie Rutter to give a specifically Northern voice. Sadly, he’s leaving, due to insufficient Arts Council funding, but his farewell show is a delight.
Transposing the action to Yorkshire in the 1920s, it traces a network of financial venality in which a young war widow milks a besotted banker for cash and is then fleeced by a cozening cousin who is, in turn, duped by a wily servant. Sarah-jane Potts as the heroine, Jordan Metcalfe as the servant and Mr Rutter himself as the banker are first-rate. All credit to the company for reminding us southern folk that, as Corio- lanus famously says, there is ‘a world elsewhere’. ‘Coriolanus’ until October 14 (shown live in cinemas on October 11) and ‘Dido, Queen of Carthage’ until October 28 (01789 403493); ‘Oslo’ until December 30 (0844 871 7622); ‘For Love or Money’ on tour until December 2 (01422 369704)