[In the following excerpt, Jackson comments on the French Revolutionary setting of David Thacker's production of Coriolanus, and states that the liberties Thacker took with the text were effective.]

If only on a compare-and-contrast basis, Coriolanus made a good stablemate for Henry V, and the Swan Theatre served this Roman play well. The debate scenes benefited from the intimacy of the thrust stage and galleried auditorium, while the space was sufficient to accommodate the battle in the first act or to emphasize the isolation of Caius Martius as he stood in his gown of humility waiting for “voices.” In this theater the audience could be appealed to as though they were the Roman public, and the director capitalized on this by placing the plebeians around the auditorium, making us complicit in the decisions taken, as it were, on our behalf.

David Thacker's production, with designs by Fran Thompson, set the play in a period that combined French Revolution and Empire. The Napoleonic figure of Caius Martius (Toby Stephens) was first glimpsed at the back of the stage, scowling as grain poured from above into a pit at centerstage. The store was covered before the starving common people could get their hands on it. With this Thacker provided a neat motivation for the plebeians' discontent while offering a vivid image for the play's opening scene, but he wisely avoided further elaboration on the play's sketchy political economy.

Banners proclaiming the ideals of 1789 hung from the theater's galleries: they were bloodied and tattered, suggesting a postrevolutionary (or at least post-Terror) state where liberty, fraternity, and equality had proved elusive. Thacker's aim was a general evocation of revolutionary times rather than a pedantic application of historical specificity to the play. At the back of the stage hung a huge half-finished reproduction of the central figures in Delacroix's Liberty Leading the People, with the tricolor replaced by a red banner. … (At previews it was the French flag, which was apparently thought too specific.) The tribunes wore brown knee breeches, waistcoats, and jackets, and (once elected) academic gowns of the same color. They appeared solidly middle-class, whereas the plebeians wore working clothes reminiscent of those worn by the crowd in Les Misérables. Volumnia (Caroline Blakiston) and the patrician women were in Empire-line dresses, recalling the period's nostalgia for Roman style and values. Menenius (Philip Voss) was a philosophe in velvet knee breeches and a turbanlike hat, and the military men wore smart black uniforms suggestive of Napoleon's entourage. Only the Volscian lords, dressed like superior footmen in blue uniforms and bicorne hats, seemed out of place, perhaps because Aufidius (Barry Lynch) and his henchmen did not differ in dress from their opponents. The plebeians (both male and female) served as Roman or Volscian soldiers as appropriate, and the battle in the first act consisted of bodies hurtling over and across the Swan's platform and up and down the aisles in an orgy of “passing over the stage.” Some spectators found this confusing as well as alarming, but the general effect was exciting. Caius Martius emerged from this melee drenched in blood.

Thacker made the citizens consistent in their opinions: it was the same “voices” who objected to Coriolanus's banishment that, when told in 4.6 of his march against Rome, said they were reluctant to make him go. The arguments with which the play opened were serious and seemed to come from genuine hardship, and the disgruntled plebeians listened to Menenius with respect but no sign of real conviction. Caius Martius's arrival cut the debate short in any case. At the end of the first scene, the citizens showed no enthusiasm for the impending campaign against the Volsces but (following the Folio direction) chose instead to “steal away.”

Toby Stephens was a strident, energetically disdainful, and very young Coriolanus, exuding the naive self-assurance of a school captain who excels effortlessly on the playing field and looks forward to a life of hero worship. He was also remarkably good-looking. With a Martius this young, the impressive military record became miraculous, and we lost the possibility of a Coriolanus whose long career of both taints and honors was now coming spectacularly to a head. What we got instead was a superbrat, but this had its own advantages. The hero's callowness counted as a sort of political innocence, nearly enough to excuse his brashness. This was a Coriolanus whom one could not easily dismiss as a functionary of a militaristic state or a crazed fighter driven by his own testosterone. With the admiring, smooth-tongued Menenius around to excuse each new feat of haughtiness, he might have gotten away with a great deal. He was a credible political threat.

The senate clearly accepted the idea that he was too modest to hear himself praised, but the plebeians and their tribunes were not so easily persuaded that good qualities were simply masked by a defiant, haughty manner. In the “voices” scene it was clear that no “toge” could be wolfish enough to humiliate him, and he disdained to reveal any of his body (let alone his wounds) to the plebeians whose votes he was soliciting. So long as events supported and endorsed his arrogance, he could strut and bellow; but once he was exiled, this Coriolanus began to speak a different language, reverting to his former manner only under the pressure of Aufidius's taunts in the final scene. The risk taken by Stephens—that of alienating the audience by curling the lip so relentlessly in the first half of the play—eventually paid dividends. Aufidius was by contrast reserved and calculating: when he encountered the disguised Coriolanus in 4.5, it was the Volsce who had a vivid sense of the erotic charge in their meeting. This was a kind of intimacy that Coriolanus never seemed to understand.

At times Caroline Blakiston's Volumnia had the shrillness of a high-comedy grande dame, especially in the conversation about her son's wounds or in her 3.2 attempt to persuade him to be politic for once. Despite this, the respect others paid her suggested that she was still a power to be reckoned with in Rome. The hero's youth made his dependence on his mother less surprising than it might have been in a middle-aged man, but when Volumnia stalked offstage, leaving her son to protest weakly “I am going to the marketplace,” one felt that even a more mature Caius Martius would have buckled. When after her son's departure she told Virgilia to “leave this faint puling” and when she faced the tribunes in 4.2, this Volumnia was near to hysteria but still more frightening than embarrassing.

In 5.3 Coriolanus sat dressed in a golden breastplate as the women and his son approached in white robes whose lower hems were drenched in blood—a symbolic rather than realistic touch, for their bare feet were not bloodied. Aufidius and his attendants (who included the Roman spy from 4.3) watched from the iron gates. Thacker directed the scene so that the women were kneeling for longer than the text indicates—accommodating this with the adjustment of a line to “Come, ladies, let us shame him with our tears” (rather than “knees”). In terms of the sightlines of the Swan's thrust stage, this staging made practical sense, but it also focused attention resolutely on the emotional state of the hero. Volumnia prostrated herself, her hands grasping his feet, for her last plea, then rose in weary resignation. It was her disdainful declaration “This fellow had a Volscian to his mother” that broke him. After wringing her hands while trying to remain turned away from her, Coriolanus cried out, “O mother, mother! What have you done?” as though the dam had suddenly burst. Thacker presented the triumphal return of the women to Rome as a sub-Beethoven anthem, with the words “Hail, hail our patroness,” led by the treble voice of the young Martius—a lapse of taste that did not detract from the effect of Volumnia's despairing numbness. She realized exactly what she had done.

In the last scene Coriolanus was knifed by assassins (rather than shot, as in Peter Hall's production for the National Theatre). The intimacy of this death was preferable to any ironic effect that might have been gained by the unchivalrous use of firearms. The production's final image was that of Aufidius cradling his adversary's body in a last soldierly embrace and toppling under its weight as the Volsces refused his request to “assist.” This moment was essentially a private affair between the two of them, and Thacker made even less of the Volscian state than the text's meager evidence can possibly support (other productions have distinguished between a civil Rome and a tribal Corioles) because this suited his version of the hero's life. Those who, for one reason or another, loved Caius Martius came to grief, most notably Menenius, whose rejection was one of the most moving scenes in the production. Coriolanus died without comprehending his relationship with any of those near him, including, in the final moments, Aufidius, who seemed to share in Coriolanus's tragedy of isolation.