Before seeing the live screening of Coriolanus today I took in an episode of House. It brought out the issue central to both works, namely the problem of the Great Man: how do society and the special individual, endowed with extraordinary talent, accommodate each other? The answer is not very well at all. House, brilliant diagnostician, behaves with total and amused contempt for societal and institutional norms, and his genius, while saving paitents, moves like a giant wrecking ball through the lives of those around him. Coriolanus, great warrior and orator, is similarly aloof from the world of dingy democracy. It's a preoccupation where Shakespeare does seem to be in tune with the modern mind. In play after play, we see a Great Man (and, arguably two Great Women, Lady M and Cleopatra) floundering and unable to function in the political world: Macbeth, Antony, Hamlet, Lear, Brutus. Fast forward to now and we have our own succession of genius figures outside the net of normality: the genius must be Asperger-y (Sherlock, and SH is the obvious inspiration for House, himself inspired by a doctor), or latent badass (Walter White) or, commonest of all, maverick cop held back by the (often corrupted) rules, from Dirty Harry onwards. We pay for society by either reining in the great ones - and our own capacity for greatness - by the banality of politics, or leave them to roam the badlands of our imagination.But back to Coriolanus, in the Donmar Warehouse production starring Tom Hiddleston and directed by Josie Rourke. What a luxury to see these sell-out productions from the comfort of a cinema seat without the hassle and costs of travel. Recent visits to screeings of Macbeth, The Queen and Billy Budd remain as vivid as any 'real' theatrical experience. There was much to enjoy here. Hiddleston's central performance was magnetic. Mark Gatiss was in great form as Menenius, in which he simply and effectively slipped the equally patrician establishment Mycroft into blank verse. Peter de Jersey (Cominius) gave an admirable exposition of fluent verse-speaking, and Deborah Findlay found a human angle on the original tiger mum Volumnia (though how this palpably and irritatingly bonkers mum manages to persuade her son at the end continues to mystify me). The lovely Birgitte Hjort Sorenson was imported from Borgen in order to look sexy and upset as Virgilia, which must be one of the worst-written parts in the canon (the character is simply obliterated by Volumnia or Coriolanus in every scene). Hadley Fraser was a bluff and believable Aufidius, who delivered the ultra-weird homoerotic bondage speech convincingly and had a good line in dental stops. A small company, so there was no crowd for the Tribunes to appeal to (coluldn't some of them have thrown on a cloak of some kind?) leaving the supposed clamour of the hungry masses in the hands of a couple of graffiti artists: still, what you lose in large scale you make up in small, and the chamber quality of most of the piece came over strongly here.
I found myself admiring the staging a good deal. Donmar Warehouse, as it happens, is about the same size as my own school theatre and there was a good deal to learn about simple and clear effects: I liked seeing the company around the stage in the first part (does this Brechtian device ever not work?), the painted areas on the stage, the strong use of top and backlighting, unfussy costumes, blink-and-you-miss them scene changes with minimal props, moderate use of digital projection and effective blocking in the round. No condescending efforts were made to remind us all of the contemporary relevance: the waving of order papers was a nice touch. And the final coup de théatre ended the production on a strong visual note. On a day where Michael Grandage's comments that theatre audiences should be trusted to rise to the demands of art, this was a clear demonstration of that philosophy in action.
