[In the following review, Shore assesses Jonathan Kent's production of Coriolanus for London's Almeida Theater. Shore notes that Kent's production focused on the personal aspects of the play rather than on the social and political elements.]

In the opening moments of the Almeida's production of Coriolanus, it is sometimes difficult to make out what the citizens gathered deep upstage are so upset about. In the hangar-like acoustic of the Gainsborough Studios, a number of early lines are lost—until, that is, Paul Moriarty as the First Citizen clears his throat to deliver his mocking indictment of Coriolanus' valour in battle: “'e did it to please 'is mother!” The effect might almost be deliberate. Though of all Shakespeare's works Coriolanus is the play most obviously concerned with questions of state power, in Jonathan Kent's staging the personal is constantly favoured above the overtly political. Of all the information conveyed in the opening debate, the key to what follows is not the just provision of corn, nor the enmity between plebs and patricians—the first matters raised by the citizens—but the fact that Coriolanus is a mother's boy.

In his programme note, the psychologist Anthony Clare explains what members of his profession would make of the dramatis personae, were they to present themselves for analysis. In particular, regarding what has generally been identified as Coriolanus' “tragic flaw”, his superbia, Clare observes “pride is so often for the psychologist a mask covering a deep-seated and corrosive insecurity”. The actors have obviously taken this perspective to heart, for the approach to characterization on stage—especially that of Coriolanus—has less to do with tragic conflict than with clinical diagnosis. Rarely can a leading actor have strained so little to attract sympathy as does Ralph Fiennes in the title role. He indulges in none of the charismatic histrionics typical of actors who find in the character a prefigurement of twentieth-century dictators, but instead gives us a portrait of the killing machine as schoolboy cipher, stamping his feet like a spoilt child when he meets resistance from his mother. This Coriolanus is, in Clare's words, a “personality disorder”, an archetypal “hollow man” devoid of reflective capacity and afraid to acknowledge personal or social obligations.

Such a modern emphasis on characters as “cases” is none the less achieved through the most traditional of means—close attention to the way people express themselves. As Coriolanus' mother, Volumnia, Barbara Jefford is especially illuminating. Jefford replaces the character's usual marmoreal steeliness with a bloodthirsty romanticism that renders her at once more human and infinitely more monstrous. The audience is goaded into uneasy laughter, as Volumnia and Menenius, awaiting Coriolanus' return from battle, pass the time by enumerating the scars on his body. “He had, before this last expedition, twenty-five wounds upon him”, his mother cries. “Now it's twenty-seven. Every gash was an enemy's grave”, adds the man who thinks of himself as Coriolanus' father. The corruption of “natural” feeling is universal, whether it is Cominius saying he would grant any prisoner—“Were he the butcher of my son”—freedom, if Coriolanus wished it; or Valeria and Volumnia delighting in Coriolanus' son's “mammocking” of a butterfly; or Coriolanus himself, saving his strongest expression of feeling for Cominius, “O! Let me clip ye / In arms as sound as when I wooed”, while remaining tight-lipped before his wife. Indeed, this focus on the perversion of “normative” feeling among Rome's ruling class makes the part of Virgilia seem both more central and less satisfactory—it is one of the few roles that Shakespeare can be accused of having under-written—and places a delicate emphasis on Coriolanus' homoerotic longing for hand-to-hand combat with Aufidius (Linus Roache, here more like a flamenco dancer than a merciless warrior). Certainly the embrace in which Coriolanus finds himself, mid-fight, with his great enemy is as close as he gets to physical intimacy all evening.

Coriolanus is built on the sort of epic scale that so appealed to Hollywood producers in the 1950s: period dress, battle scenes, rioting mobs, political pageantry. The Gainsborough Studios—where Hitchcock made some of his early films—would be ideally suited to such a Technicolor treatment, but in Kent's production the dress is nondescript and modern and Rome's massed soldiery would barely fill a Range Rover. The inspiration for this intimate approach to epic may have been financial; whatever the cause, it works well. The terrors of war are brilliantly if simply evoked: a large, rusted iron shutter to one side of the stage lifts to belch forth smoke and white light, as Fiennes prepares for his solo charge on Corioles. An enterprising use of a floor-lit central square readily turns the naked stage into the senate; a beautifully musical sequence featuring singing “apron men” argues wordlessly the value of civic harmony.

What of the spoken politics? As its stage history attests, Coriolanus has characteristically been seen as the most political of all Shakespeare's plays, its incipient class war irresistible to both Left and Right. In shaping the role of Coriolanus Shakespeare may have had in mind Essex or Ralegh; later adapters and producers have found their own political parallels, as in Nahum Tate's 1681 royalist version, The Ingratitude of a Common-Wealth, produced just after the Popish Plot, or John Dennis's 1719 Whig version, The Invader of his Country, which takes up a parallel with the Old Pretender, or any of the innumerable twentieth-century productions that have stressed the “relevance” of the play to fascism or Communism. But in Kent's production, there are no gross parallels; here, he softens the mob into a kind of chorus, who express, in Peter Hall's phrase, “the ebb and flow of doubt and belief, or resolution and irresolution in each individual's thoughts”. If nothing else, by refusing to stress the class conflict Kent solves the fundamental dramatic problem encountered by more partisan readings: the play's two-part structure. The last two acts, Coriolanus' march on Rome, are an embarrassment to the political Right, while they are largely irrelevant to those whose interests lie with the voice of the people. At the Gainsborough Studios, Coriolanus emerges whole, and very nearly a great play.