[In the following review of director David Farr's 2002 Royal Shakespeare Company production of Coriolanus at the Swan Theatre in Stratford-upon-Avon, Carnegy finds the exotic setting in feudal Japan visually appealing and describes the compelling performance of Greg Hicks as a haughty and aloof Coriolanus.]

Coriolanus is famously Shakespeare's most political play, and the hero's insensitivity to democracy needs its battle-ground—in the RSC's new staging, not Rome but the Japan of the Samurai. You would imagine there's blood enough in the play without wondering whether seppuku might have been the answer to Coriolanus's problems, but this is the route on which David Farr's production embarks.

Of course there's no question that Samurai finery looks great on Greg Hicks, and that his mother and wife are decorative in kimonos. But if you're going to do Japan then you've got to do the whole kabuki, and that means severely stylised acting. It could perhaps be done, but it isn't attempted here and so you're left with the clothes, a dash of exotic atmosphere and, orbital around Greg Hicks's proudly despotic Coriolanus, lots of very British, naturalistic acting—the cheerfully avuncular reasonableness of Richard Cordery's Menenius, the emotional blackmail of Alison Fiske's Volumnia, Coriolanus's mother and the real catastrophe in his life. The nearest anyone comes to matching the style to the silks is Chuk Iwuji as Rome's enemy Aufidius, economical of gesture and passionate in speech. It's not exactly Chu Chin Chow or The Mikado but you're perilously close to Saddam Butterfly.

Directorial fantasy aside, the show is hugely worth it for Greg Hicks. Coriolanus is a role for which his Romanic profile and air of frowning hauteur suit him to perfection. Here is the aristocratic warrior, the steely man of action, of wondrously terse and scornful speech. But what of his dealings with the people, ostensibly the core of the political content? The problem is that for all the token axe-waving by the populus, its representatives, the Tribunes, are put across as unbearably smug and deficient in anger. They're after a place on the Senate as soon as it can be managed, and seem in as much of a hurry to leave the people behind as Coriolanus is to remain aloof. You're left with precious little sympathy for them and very much more for Coriolanus, on trial to the people for his loyalty before he can be elected consul—showing them his wounds and eating humble-pie. He knows, as they know, that it's a ridiculous sham, and when he recoils from the hypocrisy you cannot but help side with Hicks's Coriolanus in his honesty and cheer him on as he cries ‘I banish you!’, insisting that the geisha-typists at his unseemly inquisition set down also that ‘there is another world’.

The trouble is that Coriolanus's ‘other world’ is one in which he seeks revenge by taking sides with Rome's deadly enemies, the Volscians. His real tragedy is that it doesn't really matter who his enemies are because the unacknowledged enemy remains within. Hicks makes a wonderfully effective contrast between the fractured, halting way in which his Coriolanus dredges up phrases with which to address the people, and the smooth eloquence with which he accedes to his mother's plea that he abandon his revenge and return to the bosom of Rome. In that moment, he knows he has signed his death warrant and lost the battle with himself. It's a riveting performance.