There Is A World Elsewhere

Strong revivals abound as Coriolanus and Dido complete the RSC’s Rome season and the National Theatre’s Oslo resonates with current global instability

THE play Coriolanus means different things at different times. In 1930s Germany, the hero was seen as a glamourised Führer; in the 1950s, to a Marxist like Bertolt Brecht, it was a tragedy about the ‘individual’s indispensability’. However, it is difficult to see any strong political line in Angus Jackson’s Stratford revival, which completes the RSC’s quartet of Roman plays. The production is clear and fastmoving, but better on psychology than politics.

It starts with the potent image of corn stashed behind an iron fence, a reminder of the Midland riots triggered by bad harvests in 1607 and that the Roman populace had a genuine grievance against the grain-hoarding ruling class. After that, the modern-dress production settles into a traditional clash between an arrogant, militaristic hero and an easily manipulated mob.

Where it scores is in its picture of personal relationships. Compared to great past performances —Laurence Olivier, Alan Howard, Ian McKellen—Sope Dirisu’s Coriolanus often seems vocally rigid and inflexible, but he brings out the hero’s fatal dependence on his mother and his homoerotic attachment to his military opposite, Aufidius.