Here’s some trivia to drop the next time your cocktail-party conversation turns to Shakespeare. T.S. Eliot thought Coriolanus was superior to Hamlet. In his essay “Hamlet and His Problems,” after calling Hamlet an “artistic failure,” he went on to say that “Coriolanus may be not as ‘interesting’ as Hamlet, but it is, with Antony and Cleopatra, Shakespeare’s most assured artistic success.” Eliot also calls Measure for Measure a “profoundly interesting play of ‘intractable’ material and astounding versification,” so he wasn’t totally off his rocker.
Personally, I think Harold Bloom was more on point when he called Coriolanus “the strangest” Shakespeare’s 39 plays. And that’s probably why productions—such as the current Daniel Sullivan–directed Shakespeare in the Park version, a must for completists but a miss for enthusiasts—are so rare.
An examination—or indictment, depending on your degree of optimism—of the democratic process, Coriolanus is surely Shakespeare’s most overtly political play. We’re in Rome, though Beowulf Boritt’s set—a testament to the dangers of non-biodegradable single-use plastic bottles—could be any post-apocalyptic wasteland. Armed with pipes and rebar, the plebeians are ready to riot over the price of corn. The patrician-packed senate calms the commoners by allowing them to elect five representatives. Then, the uppity Caius Martius (Jonathan Cake)—later dubbed Coriolanus—enters, calls the people “dissentious rogues” and “scabs,” and goes off to battle the Volsces. The plebes, incidentally, hate Martius as well.
[Read Michael Sommers’ ★★★ review here.]
Martius may not be a diplomat, but he’s a damn good soldier, and he has no trouble taking down the Volsces and their leader, Aufidius (Louis Cancelmi). “I’ll fight with none but thee,” Martius sneers at Aufidius, “for I do hate thee/ Worse than a promise-breaker.” Not one of Shakespeare’s sharpest insults, eh? As a reward for his wartime work, Martius, now named Coriolanus, is given the role of consul. But there’s a catch: He has to beg for it. Basically, he has to go out and campaign for votes from the aforementioned commoners. Schmooze them, show his battle scars—that kind of thing. But he’s not as excited about being stabbed as his mom, Volumnia (Kate Burton), is: “O, he is wounded; I thank the gods for’t.”
Thus ensues a struggle between a squirming Coriolanus and the people, a sulky Coriolanus and his mother, and a vicious Coriolanus and all of Rome, ending with his banishment and a burn-filled speech that would really sting if Coriolanus were actually a well-written character, or if Cake really had a firm grip on the role. (Both his Benedick and his Antony, the latter at the Public Theater in 2014, were superb.)
For a play that makes so much of the division between the classes, this Coriolanus looks way too homogenous. Cake is wearing a camo-patterned T-shirt when Coriolanus heads to battle, but the plebes and patricians dress remarkably alike. Volumnia is a noblewoman—you can tell just by her name!—but if you saw her on the street in New York, you’d put $1 in her coffee cup. Of course, as soon as Burton speaks, there’s no mistaking Volumnia’s status.
That Burton manages to make Volumnia even remotely human is a rare achievement. (This is a woman who beams with pride when she hears that her grandson tore apart a butterfly with his teeth.) But it’s not enough to bring Coriolanus anywhere near Eliot’s absurd “artistic success” category.
Coriolanus opened Aug. 11, 2019, at the Delacorte Theater. Tickets and information: publictheater.org
