It takes a particular kind of man to carry on scything down the opposition even with a sheaf of arrows sticking out of his blood-smeared back, and that man is Coriolanus, the hero warrior trained from birth to be a fighting machine. He is often played as a compromised tragic hero, but the Ninagawa Company's lush, almost operatic production located in the samurai era goes for something a little different.
In this Japanese-language production, Coriolanus is a deeply flawed man who is felled not by another's sword, but by a failure of masculinity and an inability to visualise a world in which it is not brute strength but humility and compromise that are required. Even in death, his empty sword hand continues to slice the air. It is like watching a clockwork toy soldier run down.
Despite the vast mirrors that reflect the audience back on itself, Yukio Ninagawa's approach lacks the strong political reading that this play often gets and deserves, but boy, does he makes up for it. When he places his actors on the steep, stone staircase across which bodies teem and tumble with such precision, it seems as if there are hundreds of people on stage - like watching a series of staged Old Master paintings.
The evening is brilliantly textured: its ravishing visuals, cleverly manipulative use of music and thrilling fighting provide the gloss to haul you through three hours of Shakespeare in Japanese. But Ninagawa doesn't neglect the relationships at the play's heart. A small boy's almost constant presence on stage reminds of the inner child in every man, and the bond between mother and son is almost apallingly intimate, the white mask of Volumnia's face suggesting that she knows what she has done to her son, but cannot save him from himself.
· Until Sunday. Box office: 0845 120 7550.
