Gore, spleen and obsession stride the stage at Stratford
Theatre Coriolanus Royal Shakespeare Theatre, Stratford-upon-avon
★★★★★
Dido, Queen of Carthage Swan Theatre, Stratford-upon-avon
★★★★★
Stratford-upon-avon was heaving on Saturday – thanks, not least, to the RSC’S “Stitch in Time” jumble sale, causing long queues as visitors thronged to snap up the 10,000 items of wardrobe cast-offs.
Anyone wishing to look the part of Coriolanus, however, can just smear their upper body with stageblood. What oil is to the Chippendale torso, so grimy gore is to the killingmachine bod of Sope Dirisu’s Caius Martius in Angus Jackson’s sinewy but intellectually flat-footed moderndress revival, which concludes the Shakespeare contingent of the RSC’S fitfully impressive Rome season.
In so far as it communicates the muscular valour upon which Coriolanus’s status as all-conquering warrior rests (and which brings him into conflict with his sleek-suited compatriots as he attempts to enter, then rejects, civic life), the evening succeeds. Although the early battle scene at Corioli is too stylised by half, with oddly delicate string music accompaniment, there’s some thrilling hand-to-hand grappling with his rival, Tullus Aufidius (James Corrigan, who nicely brings the homoerotic currents to the boil later on, emitting yaps of delight as his erstwhile foe slinks incognito into his camp, and defects to the Volscian side).
What’s required, though, is sharperedged psychological detail, and more sympathy-testing pride before our hero’s fall (Haydn Gwynne’s calculating Volumnia using her maternal wiles to bring her boy to heel). Dirisu – making his RSC debut – impressed us as Muhammad Ali in One Night in Miami at the Donmar; here, self-possessed and almost benign in his bearing, he could do with a steely dash of Malcolm X. That angry outburst of autocratic disdain of “You common cry of curs” has the right spleen to it but elsewhere – as with a lot of the verse-speaking in general – there’s much useful clarity without the propulsive fluency of urgent, do-or-die thought.
I wasn’t even dimly aware of Kimberley Sykes – she has done bits and bobs on the fringe and played second-fiddle as RSC director on a couple of projects – but if she continues to produce astonishments of the order of Dido, Queen of Carthage, she’ll wind up being one of the company’s brightest stars.
Her staging of what is thought to be Christopher Marlowe’s first play (c.1587-93) is the finest thing I’ve seen at Stratford all year. It’s visually ravishing, beautifully spoken and – thanks to her persistent inventiveness – there’s not a dull minute.
Part of the excitement lies in the way the piece discloses a cluster of imaginative seeds that could have borne fruit in Shakespeare. The evening begins with a tempest; Aeneas and his cohorts are washed up on the north African coast, en route to Italy, routed at Troy. A soliloquy describing the fall of Troy, and Priam’s slaughter – superbly rendered by Sandy Grierson – inevitably conjures comparisons with Hamlet. The plot hinges, too, on Queen Dido’s amorous obsession with her visitor, engineered at the Puckish hand of Cupid (here injecting blood purloined from Venus’s veins). And are there not shades of Antony and Cleopatra in the exotic perfume of the writing, and the lurking fear that “dalliance doth consumer a soldier’s strength”?
Sykes’s production allows you to register all these parallels without reducing the play to a literary footnote. Unleashing iridescent waterfalls to offset a compact expanse of grey-sand, it argues the case for the work as its own bejewelled thing. A surprisingly modern boldness – in the jaunty pederast declarations, say, of Nicholas Day’s elderly Jupiter at the start – combines with intensity of a remoter sort, culminating in the physical convulsions of a desolate Dido (a terrific Chipo Chung), as she suffers fatal withdrawal symptoms after Aeneas’s departure. A Marlovian marvel.
Coriolanus until Oct 14. Tickets: 01789 403493; at the Barbican (020 7638 8891), Nov 6-18; live broadcast Oct 11. Dido, Queen of Carthage until Oct 28; Tickets: 01789 403493; rsc.org.uk