A dragon without fire Michael Billington misses the menace in the RSC's revival of Shakespeare's best political play.
IT is twelve years since the last Stratford Coriolanus: an absurd neglect of Shakespeare's best political play.
But the new production at the Royal Shakespeare Theatre, directed by Terry Hands and John Barton, has a lot going for it.
Pace.
Clarity.
The best Volumnia in years from Barbara Jefford.
But, in an ideal world, one would look for more dangerous animalism than one gets from Charles Dance's Coriolanus in order to sharpen the edge of political debate.
What makes this such a great play is Shakespeare's analytical power: as John Barton once pointed out, Shakespeare is neither right-wing nor left-wing but wing-less.
Coriolanus is seen as a magnificent warrior, a psychologically damaged mother-worshipper and a potential threat to an evolving republic.
The people, on the other hand, are suffering from famine at a time when the patricians are hoarding the grain-harvest but are themselves easily manipulated by the Tribunes.
Shakespeare does not so much take sides as show how the state is threatened by the tragic collision of opposing forces: for antique Rome read Jacobean England.
What is good about the current production is that it does not seek to tilt the play either way: it allows us to decide where we stand.
It also implies, rather than re-creates, the past: Christopher Morley's set consists of three mobile siege-towers with the Romans, in costume terms, veering to black leather, the Volscians to scarlet greatcoats.
And along the way the production makes a number of intelligent points.
The Tribunes are strongly contrasted, with Geoffrey Freshwater's bullish rabble-rouser of a Sicinius Velutus offset by the ineffectual moderation of Joe Melia's Junius Brutus.
The continuity of martial values is also brilliantly suggested at the end when Coriolanus's son ritually receives his father's sword from Volumnia while his mother looks grievingly on.
What I miss, however, in Charles Dance's Coriolanus is a sense of implacable danger.
Mr Dance gives us many of the man's essential qualities: his psychological dependence on his mother, his solitariness (he is constantly placed down front gazing over the audience's heads), his antique, tribal valour.
But there is a dragonish aspect to Coriolanus which Mr Dance has yet to catch.
He also throws away too many key phrases: ' This Triton of the minnows' is a magnificent epithet for Sicinius but it here gets lost and although in the great banishment-speech Mr Dance's body-language is good (as he hurls his coat to the ground in fine disdain) it is significant that the directors resort to an echo-chamber effect on ' There is a world elsewhere. '
Olivier, one wanly recalls, had his own built-in reverberations.
Without a dictatorial Coriolanus, Shakespeare's point about the implied threat to the republic is stated rather than felt.
But there is rich compensation in Barbara Jefford's magnificent Volumnia: why has this superb actress been given only two roles by the RSC in 30 years?
She is, essentially, a voluptuous Volumnia whose hold over her son is dangerously sexual.
Greeting him on his return from battle, she hands him over to his wife with palpable reluctance; seeking to calm him before his confrontation with the people, she shackles him in an iron grip; and, in the great plea with him not to sack Rome, she pinpoints the lines about him treading on his mother's womb ' that brought thee to this world '.
Volumnia can easily be played as a sexless harridan: Ms Jefford interprets her as a passionate woman who dominates her son physically as well as spiritually, even to the extent of giving his face a resounding slap when he is recalcitrant.
But the other key roles are also strongly cast.
Malcolm Storry's bullet-headed Aufidius is not simply a rude barbarian but an acute analyst of Coriolanus's character: Mr Storry has the priceless gift of making the language tangible so that when he says' I think he 'll be to Rome as is the osprey to the fish ' the image comes resonantly alive.
Joseph O'Conor also makes Menenius infinitely more than a wily patrician: he seems the only one capable of communicating sanely with the several, warring factions.
In what is normally seen as a male-dominated play, it is also worth noting that Hands and Barton give the women unusual prominence.
Amanda Harris's Virgilia is no simpering wet but a loyal wife who vehemently thumps the tribunes for their banishment of her husband.
And Jane Maud's Valeria is characterised in the programme as' priestess of Diana ' and, in the final peace-mission, is given unusual symbolic weight.
That is a sign of how the play has been intelligently re-thought.
The production also takes on board the point Anne Barton makes in the programme that Shakespeare, following Livy, sees Coriolanus as a threat to the balance of the state.
But for the idea to be made manifest one needs a Coriolanus who is not only a truculent fighter but also a thrillingly horrific force of nature.
Charles Dance as Coriolanus... a threat to the republic?
PHOTOGRAPH: DOUGLAS JEFFERY
Ready for a huge family row Television.
By Hugh Hebert
GIRDING up for six hours with the Mahabharata is a long training.
At the weekend we had Peter Brook's approach via the South Bank Show (LWT) and through the foothills of Lear and the Marat/Sade to this Everest of an Indian epic.
Last night, there he was again between the sections of The Greatest Story (Signals, C4), a kind of Michelin guide to the Hindu poem generally said to be 15 times as long as the Bible; a fact I am not inclined to check.
To cut a long legend short, it's about the bloody rivalry between two branches of a Hindu royal family  the five Pandava brothers, who all marry the same princess, and the 100 Kaurava brothers.
Both sides know that eventually it will come to a fight.
Meanwhile, the leading Pandava brother is enticed into a dice game he knows he will lose but can not resist.
Unable to quiet the gambling fever, he loses his kingdom, his family, their shared wife, and himself.
The Pandavas are banished to the forest for 12 years, but eventually the great war comes...
The South Bank Show was a help in understanding how and why Brook has spent 15 years bringing this great poem to the stage and now the screen.
It's the culmination of his development in the theatre since the mid-Sixties brought his unforgettable Lear with Paul Scofield; his Theatre of Cruelty season; and the sledgehammer, operatic impact of his Marat/Sade.
It also isolated how he has approached the tricky transfer to the screen: ' Theatre is the art of suggestion and not of statement... the cinema has to produce complete images. '
That is the key problem.
But it was Signals that offered just what we need before settling down on Saturday night with soft cushions and iron rations: a clear summary, and the chance to fix on the central characters in this huge dramatic tapestry.
Brook talked about that central game of dice that Yudishthira plays, ' an ordinary, everyday action... it also has overtones, through the poetic to the metaphysical and the supernatural, and this is just as in Shakespeare.
It's as though you put together Coriolanus, Henry IV, Hamlet and the Tempest.
All these values are there simultaneously within the Mahabharata.
It explodes all conventional ideas of morality. '
HERE in the West, episode two of Blackeyes (BBC-2) hardly advances the narrative at all and slowly picks at the same psychological scabs.
As the mysterious man following Blackeyes, Nigel Planer speaks at last, though he has damn all to say.
Blackeyes Bellman herself speaks some more, and says even less than.
A top model now, she also bestrides the unspeakable marketing man Jamieson (Colin Jeavons), a noisy commercial humping in a once-fashionable seaside hotel.
Down in the ballroom, Dennis Lotis is crooning Try A Little Tenderness to a dance floor awash with unsteady pensioners.
It's the most Potterish moment so far.
' Was that a real orgasm, d' you think? ' asks narrator Dennis, ' No, all fake, of course.
But what happens to her, to me, if  made to pretend  we pretend too often? '
Half way through the Blackeyes saga, it looks as though we are going to have to make do with a few set pieces of one-to-one hostility.
On Radio 4's Start the Week, Potter emphasised his characters' aloneness  separated by passages where the writer does his directorial exercises.
There was the interview in the morgue between Jamieson and Detective Blake, whom John Shrapnel has made into the one compulsively watchable character so far.
And there is Blackeyes herself undergoing her first trial by fire under the photographer's lights and lascivious eye.
' I do nt think we should compromise here, ' he says as he lures her out of her bra, and the narrator repeats the theme as his camera pans round to give us an eyeful of the picture man getting down to nipple level.
And the narrator intones, ' I 'm compromised out of his dirty mouth. '
Yet if anything compromises Potter here, it's not playing voyeur.
It's his failure to punch home his underlying theme.
Instead of recognising a commercial exploitation, we're invited to see male lust as the corrupting force.
As an admirer of Potter's plays, I wait to see the rabbit come out of the hat.
But we're running out of screen time.
Saddened Blackeyes's last line this time was: ' Jesus, why weren't you a woman? '
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