Coriolanus at the National Theatre review: a scorching stage return from David Oyelowo

David Oyelowo makes a scorching return to the UK stage in this tightly focused, ferocious staging of Shakespeare’s Roman play. Beneath its simplistic plot of a war hero’s political elevation and then rejection, his revenge and demise, Coriolanus is a nuanced exploration of the double-edged danger of populism.

Lyndsey Turner’s production therefore feels hugely timely and is rich in texture and detail. But it simply wouldn’t work without Oyelowo’s relentless, driving conviction.

Coriolanuses – Coriloanii? – come along rarely, and prominent actors I’ve seen in the role previously struck me as unconvincingly ruthless: miffed accountants rather than incandescent gods of carnage. Ralph Fiennes’s 2011 film came closest, because Fiennes is an actor unafraid of being disliked. Ditto Oyelowo.

He doesn’t fight shy of the character’s contempt for the Roman poor on which his advancement depends. His naturally benign face seems to harden and warp as Coriolanus’s arrogance consumes him. He speaks Shakespeare’s verse with rare fluency. He’s also a convincing combatant in excellent fight scenes. If anything, the production and its poster fetishise his ripped torso and arms too much.

Oyelowo has excellent support from a mellifluous Kobna Holdbrook-Smith as Coriolanus’s rival-turned-ally Aufidius, and from the fierily emphatic Pamela Nomvete as his mother Volumnia. As Sicinius and Brutus, the tribunes who rally the plebeians against the war hero, Jordan Metcalfe and Stephanie Street are impressively amoral and spineless: they don’t mind being disliked either.

Es Devlin’s design makes clear that this Rome is a museum, trapped in its traditions and entrenched social inequalities. Vast concrete blocks rise and fall, revealing statues and urns dotting public spaces – starving hoi polloi spray orange paint on a bronze, a la Just Stop Oil – but also noble apartments with similar artworks. Video, so often a foreground technique in theatre these days, here underlines the immediate nature of the play’s politics. The antihero’s meltdown happens at a public debate.

Written in the great autumnal spurt of Shakespeare’s career, the script contains pleasing echoes of earlier, more popular works, and gems of its own. How great it is again to hear Coriolanus’s patrician mentor Menenius (Peter Forbes) describe himself as “one that converses more with the buttock of the night than the forehead of the morning”. And the brutal simplicity of Coriolanus’s disavowal of his heritage: “Wife, mother, child, I know not.”

It's a visit from his wife, mother and child (here stunningly presented as a ritual in robes and head-dresses) that persuades Coriolanus into a fatal softening. It’s marked by Oyelowo with a piteous groan, just as astonishing as the evocation of toxic masculinity that’s gone before.

A wonderfully natural but charismatic performer, Oyelowo was the first black actor to play an English king in a major Shakespeare production, as Henry VI for the Royal Shakespeare Company in 2001. Like many of his generation, he then found in America opportunities that were lacking here. There were tears in his eyes at the curtain call on opening night. And in mine too, almost.

National Theatre, to 9 November; nationaltheatre.org.uk