After last year’s financial challenges it’s great to see the Ashland Shakespeare Festival back — and in first-rate form.
The rarely produced Coriolanus is a coproduction with the feminist Upstart Crow Collective and Play on Shakespeare. The latter provided a modern verse translation by Sean San Jose, which proved a quite acceptable stand-in for a Shakespeare text that for once conveys more energy than poetry.
The former shrank the cast to eight woman/nonbinary performers who seamlessly explored the tragedy of a war hero both nurtured and destroyed by his mother’s living her warrior dream through him. Any fear that the violent text would be diminished by the casting quirk was immediately dispelled by the excellent performers and the poetic infusion of ritualized dance and war-choreography.
The gender casting actually serves the plot. Though Coriolanus is obviously the given tragic hero, a case could also be made to qualify his mother. Volumnia’s tragedy is that she was a woman denied the opportunity to become the heroic, suffering soldier she craved to be. So she fashioned her son into her sunken heartless warrior. That selfishness also leads her to coax him into his own eventual death. Casting women as every Everymen allowed the performers the liberty she craved. They’ve come a long way, baby.
In the event the gender issue didn’t really arise. The characters registered as people. Jessika Williams was a powerful, strident Coriolanus, as “manly” as imaginable. The other performers provided a full range off civilian characters, gender irrelevant.
The rarely-produced play immediately speaks to our present politic. The heroic warrior disdains of the common people and declares his purity in an unwillingness to pay any respect to them. Director Rosa Joshi emphasizes the matching corruption of the elected tribunes by a telling addition to the text. Having doled out miniscule portions of corn to the starving, raging populace, the tribunes steal the bulk of the bag for themselves. In this clash between the unwavering militant and the gullible civilians there is little absolute virtue.
The gender casting serves another theme as well, the implicit homoeroticism between the two central warriors. At times Coriolanus’s clash with Aufidius segues into the promise of love-making. War turns out to be yet another arena for obsessive dedication to another person — as well as to a cause or a nation.
In a brilliant casting, one actor portrayed both Coriolanus’s wife Virgilia and his fatal antagonist Aufidius. (On our night, because of an injury the understudy Ava Bingo played both roles -- brilliantly!) This Coriolanus shows a less erotic connection to his wife than to his enemy soldier. That is the twisted essence of the warrior, a hatred intense enough to turn erotic.So, too, Volumnia’s exulting in her son’s bloody success often turns sexual.
Aptly, this intensely psychological politic was performed in the small black box theatre, feeding the intimacy.
Not knowing the play, I was struck by its echoes of Antony and Cleopatra, which Shakespeare wrote at around the same time. In both a great Roman warrior is destroyed by an intense relationship with a woman. Antony is of course defined by his passion for the Egyptian queen, Coriolanus by his submission to his mother, first by her thrusting him into the suffering of war, then by her compelling him into a fatal peace. Both soldiers are ultimately doomed by softness. The play defined by love has a poetry missing from this more violent one. But this production was an equally compelling experience in its own range.
No comments:
Post a Comment