Theatre
One of Bell Shakespeare’s finest productions in recent years, Peter Evans’ Hobbesian staging of Coriolanus is a brutal look at power and politics. By Chantal Nguyen.
Bell Shakespeare’s Coriolanus strikes at the core of humanity
Explosive and ambitious, Shakespeare’s Coriolanus is so multilayered that it is almost more famous for being difficult to stage well. Although often consigned to the too-hard basket, the play was declared by poet T. S. Eliot to be Shakespeare’s greatest tragedy, while the academic Harold C. Goddard remarked, “In proportion to its merit, Coriolanus is possibly Shakespeare’s most neglected play.”
Coriolanus also bears the dubious honour of being one of the few Shakespearean plays to be suppressed in democratic countries in recent history. Productions were cancelled in 1930s France due to fears it would be exploited by fascists. The Allied powers reportedly banned it in post-World War II Germany to protect the nation’s fledgling democratic values. And while the Nazis praised it as revealing the falsehoods of democracy, Bertolt Brecht adapted it in the early 1950s as a tragedy sympathetic to the people.
Coriolanus can shoulder these wildly opposing interpretations because of the richness of its central themes: war, class conflict, the right to rule and the sources of political power, as well as the enduring questions of what we individually owe our families and our nations, and what they owe us. All these are woven into tight strands of irreconcilable conflict, stretched to breaking in a tense plot that hurtles towards tragedy.
For such a controversial play, the plot itself is deceptively straightforward. Coriolanus is set in the turbulent early days of the Roman Republic, taking its place in Shakespeare’s canon of “Roman” plays along with Julius Caesar, Antony and Cleopatra and Titus Andronicus. In Coriolanus, the Roman general Caius Marcius – more war machine than normal man – achieves a devastating victory over the Volscian town of Corioli. Returning to Rome, he is bestowed the honorary name of Coriolanus and feted with a hero’s welcome.
He finds himself reluctantly riding a populist wave, elevated from the grimy battlefield to the heights of Roman political power. However, Coriolanus is an unashamed and unwavering elitist. He flatly refuses to appeal to the common people who give the Republic its political authority, ignoring pleas from his political allies and his family. In the election scene, he mockingly asks one of the citizens: “your price o’th’consulship?”, receiving the answer, “The price is to ask kindly.” Scheming tribunes stir the once-adoring crowd into an enraged mob, branding Coriolanus a traitor and banishing him. Plunged into bitter exile, he seeks out his former enemies, the Volsci, leading them on a vengeful military march on Rome itself.
The language of Coriolanus buzzes with this power and strife. The words are harsh and urgent, burnished with a metallic timbre. Eliot alludes to this in the opening lines of his tribute poem “Coriolan”: “Stone, bronze, stone, steel, stone, oakleaves, horses’ heels / Over the paving.”
Unlike Shakespeare’s romances or even his other tragedies, the verse rarely stands still, as if there is no time or space in Coriolanus’s world for lyrical introspection or matters of the heart. A line given to Coriolanus’s nemesis, Aufidius, exemplifies this brutal and bruising language as he describes the instability of power: “One fire drives out one fire; one nail, one nail.”
This ruthless, energetic play has not been seen on the Bell Shakespeare stage for almost 30 years, with the company opting for audience favourites such as Romeo and Juliet and Macbeth following its recent move to Walsh Bay. Its return is astounding – one of the company’s finest productions in recent years.
Palestinian–Australian actor and Logie winner Hazem Shammas takes on the role of Coriolanus in a searing, colossal performance, bursting with all the toxic power and metallic virility of Shakespeare’s language. Unique to Shammas’s characterisation is his physical and vocal embodiment of Coriolanus’s brutal nature. His gestures and speech are saturated in a sort of decadent indulgence, belying the truth that Coriolanus is not – as his public image would suggest – a selfless servant of the Republic but rather an unbalanced, emotionally stunted individual who single-mindedly delights in blood lust.
His Act 1 Corioli battle scene, for example, has Shammas sprinting and panting through increasingly bloody combat in a manner that makes you shudder, climaxing in his final lurid exhortation – “you see me smeared”. Shammas’s death scene is also a masterclass in theatrical physicality.
Director Peter Evans omits the final coda, where the Volscians reflect regretfully on Coriolanus’s killing and bear his body off stage. Instead, the drama ends with the gasping of Coriolanus’s death rattle: a sudden end that brings to mind Thomas Hobbes’s nihilistic observation that life is “nasty, brutish, and short”. While Coriolanus is often criticised for its unsympathetic hero, Shammas’s interpretation bristles with so much vigour and complexity that it fascinates as much as it repulses.
Shammas is surrounded by a cast more at home in Shakespearean language compared with recent Bell productions. Royal Shakespeare Company alumna Brigid Zengeni is a stand-out, channelling the haughty pride of Volumnia, Coriolanus’s narcissistically enmeshed mother. The one character in the play who can bend his rigid mind, Volumnia looms over Coriolanus both figuratively and physically, cashmere shawl flicked contemptuously over one shoulder. In one scene she even beats him with the bolster cushion of her chaise longue as he cowers on all fours.
Veteran actor Peter Carroll delights as the patrician Menenius. Carroll’s cynical, dandyish wink-and-don’t-tell wisdom and capering elegance provide humorous relief from the play’s unrelenting darkness, while simultaneously highlighting the complex machinations of political power.
Matilda Ridgway and Marco Chiappi, dressed as dishevelled leftist career politicians in rumpled grey suits, are both sympathetic yet repellent as the short-sighted, scheming tribunes. Suzannah McDonald (Shammas’s real-life partner), a politician’s wife in her white skirt suit and bouncy blonde haircut, is a distant yet tearfully vulnerable presence as Coriolanus’s spouse, Virgilia. Supporting characters are also wonderfully strong, particularly Gareth Reeves as General Cominius and the ebullient Jules Billington.
Despite the production’s energy, some key scenes fall short of their dramatic potential. The near-erotic encounter of the exiled Coriolanus and Volscian commander Aufidius (Anthony Taufa) is played almost for laughs, lacking the toxic ambition that Bell Shakespeare showed when the scene was extracted for last year’s The Poetry of Violence. Similarly, Volumnia’s final plea to Coriolanus – which costs him his life – does not quite hit the dramatic peak that it could. Shakespeare’s stage direction for that scene is perhaps one of his most dramatic: Coriolanus “holds her by the hand, silent”. It is the ultimate triumph of familial ties over self, the fatal breaking of Coriolanus’s will. But the weight of this scene is almost rushed over in the irresistible sweep that is otherwise one of the show’s strengths.
Evans’s Coriolanus is set in the Rome of the late 1980s, in a world where bureaucrats hold press conferences and big public calls are just as likely to be made in rooms of filing cabinets as on battlefields. The ruling class of patricians all wear slick charcoal grey suits, described by costume designer Ella Butler as “the most quietly intimidating symbol of modern authority”, while the common plebeians are styled in bright colours.
Evans has opted for a traverse stage that drives the action as characters hurry across it, creating the feeling of a public forum and class conflict where audience members face across from each other. The opening night audience members – who included Australian political figures such as Malcolm Turnbull, Yaron Finkelstein and George Brandis – were provided with tickets indicating whether they were seated on the “patrician” side of the traverse stage, or the “plebeian” side.
For all that Coriolanus tempts us to read into current political events – other commentators have described it as everything from the antithesis of Trump to the embodiment of the Trump era – Shammas insists that no such reading is necessary. Coriolanus feels so relevant yet so discomforting because it strikes at the core of the human condition, reminding us of Aristotle’s observation that man is, at heart, a political animal.
Coriolanus is playing at the Neilson Nutshell, Sydney, until July 19, and at Arts Centre Melbourne July 24–August 10.
ARTS DIARY
FESTIVAL Darwin Fringe
Venues throughout Larrakia Country, July 11-20
EXHIBITION Great and Small: Kindred Creatures in Indigenous Australian Art
Gallery of Modern Art, Meanjin/Brisbane, until May 3, 2027
CABARET Working Class Magician: Rehired
Housini Theatre, Naarm/Melbourne, July 8-12
VISUAL ART Parlingarri Amintiya Ningani Awungarra: Old and New at Jilamara Arts
UNSW Galleries, Gadigal Country/Sydney, until August 10
CULTURE Illuminate Adelaide
Venues throughout Kaurna Yarta, until July 20
EXHIBITION Paris May 68 Revolt - the Struggle Continues
WARDLOW II International Centre For The Moving Image, Naarm/Melbourne, July 11-13
LAST CHANCE
LITERATURE South Coast Readers & Writers Festival
Dharawal Country/Thirroul, NSW, until July 6
This article was first published in the print edition of The Saturday Paper on July 5, 2025 as "Power and strife".
For almost a decade, The Saturday Paper has published Australia’s leading writers and thinkers. We have pursued stories that are ignored elsewhere, covering them with sensitivity and depth. We have done this on refugee policy, on government integrity, on robo-debt, on aged care, on climate change, on the pandemic.
All our journalism is fiercely independent. It relies on the support of readers. By subscribing to The Saturday Paper, you are ensuring that we can continue to produce essential, issue-defining coverage, to dig out stories that take time, to doggedly hold to account politicians and the political class.
There are very few titles that have the freedom and the space to produce journalism like this. In a country with a concentration of media ownership unlike anything else in the world, it is vitally important. Your subscription helps make it possible.
Subscriber exclusive
Send this article to a friend for free.
Share this subscriber exclusive article with a friend or family member using share credits.
