When Bell Shakespeare artistic director Peter Evans was handed the keys to the company’s new home at Pier 2/3 in Sydney’s Walsh Bay, he knew precisely with which play he wanted to christen the space. With its generously proportioned stage, and unusually intimate 250-seat audience accommodation, Coriolanus – one of Shakespeare’s most political, and least-performed, tragedies – was his top pick.
It didn’t happen.
The national theatre company instead opted for Shakespeare’s crowd pleasers – Twelfth Night, Romeo and Juliet, Macbeth – to introduce audiences to its new harbourside performance space, the Neilson Nutshell. But three years on, Evans has finally got his way as Bell Shakespeare tackles Coriolanus for the first time in almost three decades.
In the new production, Shakespeare’s bruising exploration of politics, power and civic identity plays out in front of an audience split into two sides; where you sit will determine whose side the cast assumes you are on, patrician or plebeian. Palestinian Australian actor and Logie winner Hazem Shammas plays Coriolanus, a decorated general whose rigid elitism and disdain for the common people make him both hero and heretic.
Shammas played Macbeth for Bell Shakespeare two years ago and Evans finds the juxtaposition of the two roles compelling: while Macbeth charts the psychological collapse of an ambitious man, Coriolanus is all rigidity and resolve – a man with no time for soliloquies or self-doubt.
His inflexible convictions on the right of Rome’s elite to continue wielding unchecked power fly in the face of the fledgling republic’s ambitions for democracy, an experiment dependant on compromise.
Coriolanus cannot bend so he breaks, and in spectacular fashion; banished from Rome, the general switches sides and joins the enemy, his love for his city turned to vengeance in a binary act of political spite. The political thriller transforms into a revenge drama.
“Coriolanus is absolutely a character of conviction, and he has very clear and elitist views of the way Rome should work,” says Evans. “And what makes him remarkable is how, to his own detriment, he steadfastly sticks to those convictions.
“I’m interested in how complicated that makes the audience feel when they’re watching it – you disagree with him, but you can also see the appeal of his certainty.”
With its precarious dance between autocracy and democracy, Evans resisted mapping the play, set in the fledgling democracy of the Roman Republic circa 490BCE, too neatly onto “modern headlines”. And Coriolanus is, after all, the antithesis of a populist leader.
Evans has staged the play in another distinctive time and place: post–cold war eastern Europe in the early 1990s, as it picks itself up from the fall of the Berlin Wall and the Iron Curtain.
“There was this hope that [eastern Europe] would become this great liberal democracy,” he says. “And then, of course, through the ’90s we get the rise of the oligarchs, and end up in what is another autocracy and a very specific kind of a leader, led by an elite.”
Coriolanus remains one of Shakespeare’s least performed plays; this is only the second time Bell Shakespeare has staged it since the company was established in 1990.
“Even though it has the most amazing domestic scenes – and Coriolanus’s mother and wife are extraordinary characters – it’s certainly more overtly political than many of the others,” Evans says.
“It shows us that while complete conviction can be compelling in a politician, if they are inflexible, then it will eventually lead to an autocratic rule.”
Coriolanus may not have the marquee appeal of a Macbeth or Hamlet, but Evans contends that its relevance is perennially urgent.
“A play like this is never not timely. In the last five to 10 years, western democracy has come under question … and certainly, when I was growing up, that would have been unthinkable.”
Coriolanus plays in Sydney’s Neilson Nutshell until 20 July, then the Arts Centre Melbourne from 24 July to 10 August
