[In the following review, Smith offers a negative assessment of Ralph Fiennes's Coriolanus, although the critic does praise the efforts of the other principal actors. Smith maintains that the play was unable to effectively dramatize Coriolanus's “martial superiority.”]

Gainsborough Studios started life as an electricity generating plant for the Metropolitan Railway. Subsequently converted into a film studio, it attracted the likes of Margaret Lockwood, James Mason, Phyllis Calvert and Stewart Granger. Most famously, Alfred Hitchcock used it to make The Lady Vanishes. It is now a makeshift theatre for five months during the staging here, in repertory, of the Almeida Theatre Company's Richard II and Coriolanus, both directed by Jonathan Kent and starring Ralph Fiennes in the title roles. The venue is scruffily impressive. A cavernous space is filled with makeshift seating constructed from scaffolding and planking. There is an end-on, raked stage of bare concrete (turfed for the production of Richard II) with an upstage wall consisting of naked brick, punched through with holes and showing various service cables and pipes. Different layers of peeling paint, asymmetrical broken windows, and bare metal stairs complete the effect of a building on the verge of demolition. A gash in the brickwork runs from floor to roof level and, stage-right, a huge metal sheet (into which a small door is cut) can be raised like the blade of a colossal guillotine. Into the centre of the stage floor, a transparent, rectangular sheet of Perspex has been laid which is illuminated variously from below. This is an engaging staging but one which, at the same time, will offer no shelter to a less than stimulating production.

Against this derelict backdrop, Paul Brown had designed a beautifully costumed production. The citizens huddled round a trestle table like the matchstick men of L. S. Lowry. Dressed in different shades of grey, they formed a dull contrast to Coriolanus's long emerald coat and Menenius's checked blue suit. The Volscians wore red cassocks and Aufidius a long, glamorous, black leather coat. The contrast between tatty set and dapper costumes seemed to suggest the tentativeness of a world in which appearances were all.

The problem with Ralph Fiennes' Coriolanus was pervasive. Though the huge void of the film studio required a firm projection, his performance rarely varied from a continuous shout. His first furious entrance in which he mocks the citizens' cowardice was conducted at top volume and this left him hardly anywhere to go in subsequent scenes. A mere increase of volume on such an already high level was hardly noticeable and very quickly, his performance became unnuanced. On the other hand, Linus Roache's Aufidius and Oliver Ford Davies's Menenius were much more engaging. As he registered the hopelessness of seeking an interview with Coriolanus, Davies's Menenius broke down and wept. Roache's Aufidius was a Protean performance: greeting his exiled enemy with a passionate intensity, roaring curses upon him and, following Coriolanus's cowardly murder, uttering ‘My rage is gone’ (V.6.146) without the slightest compunction—as though he couldn't be bothered even to affect the semblance of remorse.

The battle scenes were effectively staged—wild lighting (Mark Henderson) and thunderous sound (John A. Leonard)—and the metal door became the gate to Corioles. Coriolanus tumbled out from the city covered in blood and wielding his sword. The contrast between his staggering belligerence and the plebeians' meek cowardice was emphasised as we saw them soon after discussing his actions while on their hands and knees polishing the stage which had become the floor of the Senate. His solitary puissance and their collective submissiveness seemed to exculpate his arrogance as though the production were taking his side—there was nothing mythical about his peerless status here. Even as he stood, unarmed, in the market place in the ‘gown of humility’ (II.3.41)—a rough sackcloth smock and broad-brimmed hat—the citizens circled him nervously as though he might still strike without warning.

As usual the most powerful scene was that between Coriolanus and his mother, played by Barbara Jefford. Her long sonorous persuasion was overwhelming and, as she rhetorically destroyed him, he sank to his knees: ‘O mother, mother! / What have you done?’ (V.3.183-4). Her triumphant entry into Rome was greeted by the heavens opening with a shower of poppies—an adumbration of the sacrifice of her son. The final murder of Coriolanus was something of an anti-climax with Roache's Aufidius having taken on the maximum volume that undermined Fiennes's performance up till that point. It was as though the production had failed to find a performative equivalent for martial superiority and in a play about martial superiority almost to the exclusion of everything else, this was a troubling fault indeed.