“Coriolanus” is Shakespeare’s play about Caius Marcius, the Roman general who, having won a glorious victory over the Volscians at Corioli, and feeling misprized by the Senate and the people of Rome, turned his back o them and led the Volscians in an attack against his own city. It shares with “Richard II” and “King Lear” the dubious distinction of having been adapted by Nahum Tate, who became Poet Laureate in 1692. Tate’s “Coriolanus” was called “The Ingratitude of a Commonwealth,” but Tate (whose version of “Lear” restored the old King to his throne) was notoriously bad at understanding Shakespeare. “Coriolanus” isn’t about the ingratitude of a commonwealth any more than “King Lear” in about the ingratitude of a youngest daughter. Both plays raise the question of exactly what is due the virtuous man, and they use the figure of the disgruntled autocrat to explore.
The production of “Coriolanus” that opened Thanksgiving week at the Public Theater is the sixth in Joseph Papp’s ongoing presentation of all Shakespeare’s plays. It was bound to be interesting, first as a chance to see Irene Worth’s Volumnia (she performed the role to great acclaim in London recently), and second as a chance to see Christopher Walken in the title role. Unlike many of the actors Papp has cast in major Shakespearean roles, Walken combines classical experience with a faultless sense of contemporary mannerism and gesture—the very qualities needed to make bring a somewhat obscure tragic hero to life. And Coriolanus needs all the help he can get. A sulker, a turncoat, a despiser of the common people, he is one of the most immediately objectionable of Shakespeare’s heroes—not least because he is first and last a soldier. True, we have been taught to accept valor as a manifest sign of moral virtue. But what appeals to us in Henry V is his ability to talk to the common man; in Othello his ability to tell stories. We are drawn to Macbeth for his habit of metaphor and to Richard III for his Machiavellian wit. In each case, Shakespeare gives us some theatrical reason for valuing the hero. Coriolanus isn’t a showman with words; that’s the whole point. He really is the character that Richard pretends to be: a man who “cannot flatter and look fair,” to whom pretense—whether for social or political ends—would be as insupportable as cowardly flight. So when the monster mother who created Coriolanus entreats him to speak politicly to the people, she is asking him to go against his own nature—just as surely as she is when later she begs him to spare Rome.
If Shakespeare’s challenge in “Coriolanus” is to make us care about an unsympathetic character, the current production hardly gives him a chance to prove himself. Steven Berkoff, the left-wing British playwright and actor whom Papp brought in to direct the play, has his own agenda. In general, Mr. Berkoff’s view of the play is similar to that of Kenneth Tynan, who had little use for either “Coriolanus” or its hero. Reviewing Olivier in the 1959 Stratford production, directed by peter Hall, Tynan pronounced Coriolanus a “titanic fool,” but even Tynan acknowledged that “what spurs him to betray Rome is not pride but a loathing of false servility.” Mr. Berkoff sees nothing good in Coriolanus, and he makes certain that nobody else will either. Every scene or speech or line that might possibly serve to redeem Coriolanus in our eyes is either dropped or else edited and staged in such a way as to alter its meaning. Every value is distorted and every device that might lead us to care about Coriolanus dismantled. The two corrupt tribunes, Sicinius Velutus and Junius Brutus, become genuine populist reformers. (This is achieved by trimming or obfuscating with comic business all the scenes that establish the demagogues’ lack of scruples.) The silly, empty-headed Valeria, there to serve as a foil for Coriolanus’ sober, Penelope-like wife, Virgilia, is made to seem Virgilia’s equal in grace and wisdom. (This is achieved by the simple expedient of cutting all the lines that effect a contrast between the two women.) Mr. Berkoff reduces all aspects of Coriolanus’ character to a Rambo-like arrogance and machismo; everything he does or says is made to seem laughable or disingenuous.
As a result, this “Coriolanus” bears about as much resemblance to Shakespeare’s play as most Disney animations bear to the works they’re based on. All the same, the production is seductive: elegant, sophisticated, and expertly acted almost across the board. Part of its interest lies in its very Englishness. Mr. Berkoff, trained in the modern British/European tradition of Shakespeare production, which is highly stylized and conceptual, uses mine, music (a percussion score, composed and performed by Larry Spivak), multiple casting, and nonrealistic staging to hammer home his point. (A chorus of nine men performs al the soldier-citizen-messenger roles.) The production is clad almost entirely in blacks, whites, and grays, with a minimalist set (designed by Loren Sherman) that proves hospitable to props and clothing form different periods. Martin Pakledinaz’s costumes are eclectic and ambiguously timeless: the double-breasted jackets, pin-striped suits, fedoras, and oversize raglan coats seem as fashionably “retro” as they are reminiscent of the eras they evoke. There are instances of historical specificity: Aufidius wears an urban-guerilla outfit, Menenius a coat with a twenties-style fur collar (perhaps, like Mr. Berkoff’s expressionist lighting, an allusion to the rise of Fascism). Mostly, though, the production seeks to bridge the gap, visually, between now and forever.
This is, in itself, a European idea. That Shakespeare’s plays need not be exclusively either “modern dress” or costume drama—need not adhere to any one time—goes without saying in London, where stage raft and theatrical design are more strongly influenced by Brecht and his precursors than by the realism be Belasco and Stanislavsky. To us, accustomed to Public Theater Shakespeare, it comes as a surprise that actors I a single scene can speak or move or be dressed with varying degrees of realism or stylization. (This is partly because to Papp “concept” means something that promises box-office draw: a gimmick—setting “A Midsummer Night’s Dream” in Brazil—or a star.) At its best, nonrealistic staging can expand and embellish our reading of a play. Berkoff uses it to reduce the play to one notion.
Since Coriolanus-in-action is not an idea that Mr. Berkoff permits us to take seriously, the central figure is reduced to a largely passive role, and Walken has his work cut out for him. Robbed of the opportunity to make military prowess complex, or even respectable, Walken concentrates on the psychology behind it, using his gift for gestural burlesque to lampoon male narcissism. It’s here, if anywhere, that the play’s tension is reasserted: Walken endears Coriolanus to us by endowing him with an opera buffa variety of physical charm. He shrugs and sulks and struts with such precision that occasionally we find ourselves liking Coriolanus through him. Thanks to Miss Worth, Volumnia survives Mr. Berkoff’s attempt to turn her into an indictment of British home-front values. (The idea seems to be to suggest the ferocity that lurks below the surface of Mrs. Miniver. Make of that what you will.) Here all the mother’s fierceness and Roman virtus are transmuted into a notion of gentility; they’re not lost, exactly—just diverted. Instead of an explanation of why Coriolanus is the way he is, we get a comment on what’s wrong with England.
Mr. Berkoff has surrounded Mr. Walken and Miss Worth with a company of more than usually fine players. The ensemble work, particularly, surpasses all expectation. What a relief to hear Shakespeare’s bit parts performed by actors who understand the import of their lines, and how exhilarating to see principal roles undertaken by actors of intelligence: Paul Hecht (as Menenius Agrippa, Coriolanus’ friend and chief adviser), Keith David (as Aufidius the Volscian, his arch-enemy and rival), Larry Bryggman and Andre Braugher (as the two tribunes), Moses Gunn (as the eternally bland general Cominius). Of the principals, only Ashley Crow is disappointing. In the role of Virgilia, she demonstrates a useful talent for weeping copiously on cue but no knowledge of how to speak verse. Some members of the cast are put in a tight spot by Mr. Berkoff’s version of the text and by his direction: Mr. David, by playing his role straight, gives us an Aufidius whose nobility dwarfs that of Walken’s mock-epic hero. It’s not his fault, any more than it’s Sharon Washington’s fault that her Valeria makes Virgilia look a fool. Mr. Hecht, who best of all the company achieves that marriage between feeling and idea which makes for good Shakespeare, does what he can to embody all the values that have been eliminated from his part. Waving a hand in farewell to the departing Coriolanus just before intermission, he seems to conjure up Shakespeare’s hero, not the one we have been given.
That Mr. Berkoff’s production seems as good as it does is partly a tribute to the theatrical prowess of Mr. Walken and Miss Worth, who succeed in creating drama from an emasculated text. But it’s also a function of the theatrical naiveté that the New York Shakespeare Festival has fostered in us. What enables us to be wowed b y Steven Berkoff’s “Coriolanus,” and what enables the press to react excitedly to Ingmar Bergman’s nonrealistic “Hamlet” at BAM, is Papp’s failure thought the years to keep up with Shakespeare as it is produced elsewhere in the world.
There is an irony in all this. The idea of Gesamtkunstwerk as applied to Shakespeare really got started only when Peter Hall took of the Shakespeare Memorial Theater at Stratford in 1960. In demanding that all elements of a production—music, lighting, scenery—unite to suggest a play’s themes and subtexts, he and his colleagues were chiefly rebelling against the hero centric approach that had characterized Old Vic Shakespeare, that last vestige of the despotic actor-manager tradition in which the performance of an Olivier, a Richardson, a Gielgud was everything. By making all aspects of a production equally important, Hall managed to make Shakespeare moth more literate and more democratic. The irony is that Steven Berkoff and Joe Papp have, between them, returned Shakespeare to a benighted kind of despotism. The new tyrant is the auteur-director. If, like the old tyrants, he doth but slenderly know himself, it may be because he’s too busy censoring the old plays to read them.
Mimi Kramer
The New Yorker, December 12, 1988