Coriolanus is nowhere near Shakespeare’s top-10 hit plays, so let’s remind you that it dramatizes a tragic figure from Roman history: Shown to be a valiant, brilliant warrior—virtuous, patriotic, and ever devoted to his mother—Coriolanus even further is shown to stick to lofty standards.
“His nature is too noble for the world,” observes an admirer.
Coriolanus has little use for his aristocratic peers and only contempt for the “beast with many heads” masses he reluctantly attempts to court to win higher office. When the fickle crowd turns on him, a bitter Coriolanus joins forces with his enemies and goes to war against his home town.
An imperial Rome of togas and marble columns does not materialize for director Daniel Sullivan’s good and gritty outdoor staging of Coriolanus at the Delacorte Theater in Central Park.
Shakespeare’s ugly comedy regarding an honest leader undone by dubious popular opinion unfolds in the muddy Rome of its earliest democratic era. To partly blend the Roman then with the American now, Sullivan and his astute designers dress down everybody in ratty modern togs and situates them amid bleak, rusty corrugated metal walls in a hardscrabble junkyard world. It rained heavily just before a preview performance last week, rendering everything slick, sweaty, and a tad dangerous.
[Read Melissa Rose Bernardo’s ★★ review here.]
Looking lean and kinda mean as Coriolanus, Jonathan Cake barrels like a high-powered pickup truck through the bumpy saga of his downfall. A bullet-headed figure with a profile struck right off a classic Roman coin, Cake delivers a vigorous performance that never once shifts into lower gear. As indefatigable in battle as he squirms uncomfortably in the public eye, Cake’s well-spoken Coriolanus directs a dozen differing degrees of sneers among his many foes.
Cake’s aggressive Coriolanus is encouraged by Kate Burton as his fierce eagle of a Roman matron who proudly counts his battle scars. Tops among the Public Theater’s mainstay artists, Teagle F. Bougere glows with easy warmth as a wise, avuncular, family friend. The drama’s hottest relationship is the improbable bromance that later ignites between Coriolanus and his former arch-enemy Aufidius, given an appropriately smoldering quality by a bushy-bearded Louis Cancelmi.
Tom Nelis, always an elegant presence, and an appealing Chris Ghaffari lend soldierly support as Roman generals. Ever-excellent character actors, a smarmy Jonathan Hadary and a sly Enid Graham enjoyably connive together as the self-important public advocates who whip up the Roman mob. A large ensemble races hither and yon depicting scores of noisy citizens, cool patricians, and spirited soldiers.
These combined and conflicting forces are expertly martialed by Sullivan’s smart, brisk staging, and while the show runs close to three hours (with an intermission), its doings scarcely drag. The pace grows even faster towards the conclusion, where designer Japhy Weideman’s lighting casts roiling purple and blue clouds over the action like a symbolic bruise spreading across the body politic. Designers Beowulf Boritt and Kaye Voyce admirably and respectively supply the scenery and clothes for this desolation row of a Rome that fails to appreciate its finest hero.
Sullivan does not angle his production to comment upon current events. But as you watch an inwardly cringing Coriolanus force himself to appeal to an obviously ignorant populace, you can’t help but wonder what really goes on within the minds of everybody running for president today.
Such is the everlasting genius of Shakespeare that is evident even in one of his less popular works.
Coriolanus opened August 5, 2019, at the Delacorte Theater and runs through August 11. Tickets and information: publictheater.org
