Coriolanus: David Oyelowo is thrilling as Shakespeare’s most inscrutable anti-hero
Shakespeare’s unloved tragedy about populism and hubris in Ancient Rome is often regarded as a poor cousin to Julius Caesar. Its plot is less dynamic, its unyielding protagonist, who is forced disastrously into exile by the people for failing to defend their rights, charmlessly intractable. There have been a couple of starry revivals in the last two decades – Ralph Fiennes for the Almeida in 2000; Tom Hiddleston at the Donmar in 2013 – but for a play so interested in the contingent relationship between the rulers and the ruled, it’s surprisingly neglected.
Yet Lyndsey Turner’s vaulting revival, starring David Oyelowo, thrillingly aligns the play’s tricky contours with a modern, ill-at-ease Britain. Here, the social elite swig champagne at arts events while righteous protestors rattle spray cans in museums. Meanwhile, out on the streets those canny enough to know which buttons to press can raise a mob by simply chanting the right slogan. A quick-to-erupt anger is in constant simmering proximity to hollow moral posturing.
Oyelowo is not seen enough on the British stage, rarely appearing since he lit up the RSC’S 2000 production of Shakespeare’s equally unforgiving Henry VI trilogy, to which he leant a mesmeric, limpid grace. His Coriolanus, both emotionally reserved and volatile, is simultaneously an out-of-touch member of that cultural aristocracy and a blood-lusty warrior who smashes his foes repeatedly over the head with his shield in the glossily telegenic Corioli battle scenes.
These, in Ev Devlin’s projection-heavy design, send up the curious video-game effect of modern warfare yet also, thanks to Tom Gibbon’s soaring Hollywood score, acquire an operatic grace: one of the interesting subtexts of Turner’s production is the various ways we fetishise and simplify violence. It’s there in the early exultations by Coriolanus’s mother Volumnia (a strangely rigid Pamela Nomvete) that almost eroticise her son’s war glories, the moment when Coriolanus’s young son is seen playing with a toy helicopter that in turn ushers in the drilling roar of the real thing, or the intriguing decision to set the play within a museum steeped in memorials to ancient victories.
Yet Oyelowo’s Coriolanus is also a reluctant hero, revolted by praise and disdainful of what he regards as the people’s confected displays of virtuous fury. This alert, sensitive performance reveals a man both tormented and infuriated by his increasing alienation from a world he doesn’t understand. Coriolanus is one of Shakespeare’s most inaccessible characters, and even Oyelowo can’t fully pierce the carapace, but his exiled hero is vividly riven with contempt for the role of performance in both public and political life and, indeed, in simply being a man.
Elsewhere, Devlin’s formidable concrete set design combines post-Soviet, macho political brutalism (the monolithic slabs also cheekily nod to the National Theatre, itself a site of performance) with high-end hotel-style interiors. Amid it, Oyelowo’s beleaguered consul feels like a faceless member of the global elite, with no real home life to speak of, the scenes with his surprisingly passive wife purposefully emotionally remote.
More could be made of the relationship with his nemesis, Aufidius (a somewhat buttoned up Kobna Holdbrook-Smith), but other supporting roles are full of vigour: Peter Forbes’s paternalistic Menenius; Jordan Metcalfe’s weaselly tribune. And perhaps most potently of all, Conor McLeod’s perpetually up for it protestor, a rebel on steroids always looking for a cause.
Until Nov 9. Tickets: 020 3989 5455; nationaltheatre.org.uk
