Coriolanus

[Yoshie Furuhashi <furuhashi.1@xxxxxxx>]

The New York Times
September 9, 2000, Saturday, Late Edition - Final
SECTION: Section B; Page 11; Column 1; Arts & Ideas/Cultural Desk
HEADLINE: CONNECTIONS;
If Politics Is Theater, You Have to Play to the Cheap Seats, Too
BYLINE:  By Edward Rothstein

To clinch his election as a Roman consul, Coriolanus has only to
master a bit of political theater. Shakespeare's warrior has the
support of the patrician class and the military leaders; he has
proved himself fearless in battle, magnanimous in victory and
unimpressed by flattery. Now all he must do is perform a pro forma
ritual: don a "gown of humility" and stand before the plebeian
populace, responding to the questions of their delegates, courting
their approval, displaying the scars of his many war wounds as
testimony to his worth. This public encounter, an early form of the
political convention, involves far less theatrical posturing and far
fewer inflated balloons than its more recent counterparts. But
Coriolanus so scorns Rome's common people that he is powerless on the
political playing field. He doesn't just fail, he flails.

The reasons for that failure seem particularly resonant in this
political season, which is why it may not be an accident that
Shakespeare's rarely produced tragedy is attracting unusual
attention. Tonight the Almeida Theater Company of London will present
"Coriolanus" at the Brooklyn Academy of Music, beginning a two-week
run. And it is still fresh in my mind from a strikingly focused
staging last month by Tina Packer, the artistic director of
Shakespeare & Company, in Lenox, Mass.

Ms. Packer has, over the years, created an extraordinary company of
players (which will in a few years be acting on the stage of a newly
planned replica of Shakespeare's own Rose Theater). She used only
nine actors for this production (some playing multiple parts),
staging battles and crowd scenes in a small room that was once Edith
Wharton's stable. Stripped of pomp and circumstance -- and with a
sharply etched performance by Dan McCleary in the title role -- the
play became an elegant Shakespearean demonstration of what happens
when patrician and plebeian collide, when a world based on breeding
and heroism must answer to a world based on equality and
representation.

Shakespeare may have been drawn to this subject in the early years of
the 17th century because this was precisely the situation developing
in England. More and more people were surpassing the minimum income
required to vote, while James I was trying to retain the perquisites
of royalty. Riots erupted over grain shortages and high prices. A
citizen in "Coriolanus" mocks the notion that the patricians are
concerned about the common people:

"They ne'er cared for us yet. Suffer us to famish, and their
storehouses crammed with grain; make edicts for usury, to support
usurers; repeal daily any wholesome act established against the rich,
and provide more statues daily, to chain up and restrain the poor. If
the wars eat us not up, they will."

In such a context, it becomes all too clear what an insufferable prig
Coriolanus is, scorning the citizenry, comparing plebeians to crows
pecking at patrician eagles. And if the crowd does seem a bit fickle
at times, or goes too far in demanding Coriolanus's death, he is,
after all, a representation of nobility's perversions, a heartless
killing machine presuming to fight for honor and nation. The tragedy
is that he can't recognize the power of the people for whom he fought.

This interpretation of "Coriolanus" may be the most tempting one for
contemporary directors because it most suits our own democratic
sentiments. There were times when Ms. Packer, despite her larger
vision, italicized these messages, and it will be surprising if the
Almeida Theater wields a different political brush.

But the play also has antidemocratic elements, which so endeared it
to the Nazis that it was banned in postwar Germany by American
occupation forces. In this reading, the "garlic eaters" among the
scabby rabble, easily swayed by petty concerns, bring down a virtuous
man who is a "flower of warriors," whose nature is, as a friend
proclaims, "too noble for the world." The tragedy here is that the
worst of the people topple the best of the nobility.

We may tend to recoil from this view, yet perhaps we should not just
bury this noble Caesar but also praise him. For both of these visions
of "Coriolanus" are true. Indeed, the play is about tensions that
continue to exist between democratic taste and elite sensibility in
American culture. Coriolanus's bravery, his lack of selfishness, his
allegiance to an ideal of nobility are inseparable from his contempt
for the commonplace. The people's human needs and just claims are
inseparable from their wary distrust of higher aspirations. This is
one reason the issue of political theater becomes so crucial in the
play: in a democratic universe, it is a way in which each pole grants
recognition to the other.

This is vastly different from the political imagery in Shakespeare's
greatest tragedies, written just a few years earlier: "King Lear,"
"Hamlet," "Macbeth," even "Anthony and Cleopatra." In those plays,
the characters are still nestled in patrician worlds. The issues are
not the nature of nobility in a democratic world but the nature of
political power in a patrician one. How is authority to be wielded?
How is succession to be guaranteed? How can private desires be
reconciled with public responsibilities? But with "Coriolanus,"
Shakespeare has moved on. The populace here is not the crowd of
"Julius Caesar"; for all its flaws, it possesses a powerful voice in
the future state.

This may also be a reason that Shakespeare's conception of character
changed. Harold Bloom, in his recent "Shakespeare: The Invention of
the Human," points out that in the great tragedies Shakespeare
created the modern soul, racked by internal debates and mercurial
sentiments. Yet the hero in "Coriolanus" seems to have no inner life
whatsoever. It is almost irrelevant what he feels or thinks; the only
issue is how he acts (and acts in all senses). The conflict is no
longer internal to the character but external; the boundaries of the
political universe have changed.

For better and worse, that universe is also our own. We require
theater but expect sincerity, seek equality but long for nobility,
disdaining what we also demand.