20.06.1996

To make us grieve

Helen Ellis reviews Coriolanus, directed by Steven Berkoff at the Mermaid Theatre (London, Tue-Sat 7.30pm, £9.50-£18.50)

Steven Berkoff who, as well as directing and designing this production, plays Shakespeare’s Coriolanus, is unquestionably a fascinating actor to watch. Well, I say Shakespeare’s Coriolanus ... In any production of Shakespeare the interpretations are very much personal and the best productions uncover more and more of the layers in Shakespeare’s highly complex and detailed observation of society.

This is very much Berkoff’s Coriolanus. Through years of training and experimentation Berkoff has achieved an incredible control over his body and facial muscles, of which I am sure he has many more than the average person.

He has also achieved a highly slick level of ensemble playing. All the actors move through the play together in an intricate dance. The physicality of Berkoff’s plays are always infectious to watch. The energy, humour and skill of this production was no exception, making Coriolanus a very entertaining event. The Roman citizens move with fluidity and passion; the Senators are stiff, still and Mafia-like. Coriolanus’ mother and wife invisibly sew with a stillness which contrasts with the passion inside and use their fingers to represent tears.

But many of these devices are very familiar to regular attenders of Berkoff productions. There is also an undeniable tendency with the physicality of Berkoff adaptations to invade and almost demolish very rich texts. One cannot help thinking that the movement is plonked on top of the text rather than flowing from it and drawing it out. The women’s tears did more to destroy the poignancy of the moment than enhance it, though it was very beautiful to watch.

The narrative you are left with in Berkoff’s Coriolanus is a simple tale which it is hard to believe you could find in any Shakespeare text. Shakespeare’s heroes and anti-heroes are never quite that clear. They are real, multi-layered human beings. Likewise with the social conflicts which run through all the plays. Tales of family strife, war and upheaval are never presented as the good versus the bad formula that we are so familiar with now, courtesy of Hollywood morality tales.

Berkoff’s Coriolanus is a tale of a simple manipulated mass, with their conspiratorial tribunes against a megalomaniac fascistic dictatorial Coriolanus. Coriolanus’s lines are cut in this production to emphasise this fact.

The black and white set of this production is impressive. A stark uncontrollable nightmare unfolds. But Shakespeare’s play is neither so stark nor nightmarish. It is a play about real and contradictory human motivations and choices. In Hamlet the tortured prince tells the actors who come to the palace “to show virtue her own feature, scorn her own image, and the very age and body of the time, his form and pressure” which, though it will make the “unskilful laugh, cannot but make the judicious grieve”. There seems little in this production to make us grieve, for all the skill of the performances.

Helen Ellis