My interest in Shakespeare’s Roman plays was their politics: politics as mechanism, not psychology. When we started to work on the piece we called The Roman Tragedies – a version of Coriolanus, Julius Caesar and Antony and Cleopatra that eventually went on stage in 2007 – the aim was to show how political mechanisms work, how decisions get made. You commit a murder, but you do it for political reasons. I had the vision one weekend, and it took two years of preparation to make it happen.
I’d seen Coriolanus before but the production wasn’t very good, so I assumed it was rather a bad play. When I reread it, I was surprised to discover how rich and multilayered it is. The story is quite straightforward: Coriolanus is a military guy, a warrior on the battlefield who gets sucked into politics. He gets pushed into total leadership, but he has no capacity. We see that a lot: people go into politics who don’t really have the skills for it, who aren’t prepared to listen or compromise. They go for the kill; that’s what they’re trained for. And that’s what destroys Coriolanus. I also got really interested in the role of his mother, Volumnia, who pushes him into it. She’s the real politician of the play, she knows exactly how it goes, while he behaves like a child. One of the tragedies Shakespeare is interested in is how she should have been a great leader, but can’t be. The idea is just so stark.
I was spending a lot of time in the US, where 24-hour news completely dominates, and so we came up with the idea of doing a marathon performance over six hours, no intermission. I wanted it to be continuous; you could come in and out, just like real life. You can’t imagine political life without the media any more. Every speech is manufactured for TV. So for us, the role of the media was crucial: we wanted there to be a lot of screens and scrolling information boards. After that, the idea of using audience members as the citizens seemed obvious. We brought them up on stage, then built a bar and couches for them to sit on and walk around. They became involved in the political process too.
There’s often a debate about where Shakespeare’s sympathies lie – is he on Coriolanus’s side, is the play his tragedy? Or is he on the side of the citizens, who don’t want to be ruled by a dictator? For me that’s not an interesting question; I like ambivalence. Partly, you love Coriolanus. As a society you need him, because he’s prepared to go into hell on the battlefield and risk his life. But you also hate him; he’s got tunnel vision and is a total monster. I like figures like that. I remember when I did a version of Ayn Rand’s The Fountainhead; the hero is this architect, Howard Roark, who’s kind of crazy because he can’t let go of his vision. A lot of people asked me: who do you sympathise with? I said that as an artist I sympathise with him, but as a citizen and someone who believes in democracy? Entirely the opposite.
- Ivo van Hove’s Kings of War (comprising Henry V, Henry VI and Richard III) is at the Barbican, London, 22 April to 1 May.
