Coriolanus, Donmar Warehouse

Coriolanus is a man of the battlefield. War is a language he speaks with fluency. It is the way he has been raised. But what makes him such a potent force in a time of conflict, a fire-eyed, driven machine of a man, doesn’t translate to the political arena. And this proves his undoing.

Making his return to the Donmar stage, Tom Hiddleston revels in the knottiness and complexity of the character. He last performed here as Cassio in Michael Grandage’s Othello, in which he more than held his own alongside the magnetic, magnificent Chiwetel Ejiofor and in many ways eclipsed Ewan McGregor’s Iago. Now – following his Asgardian interlude – he confirms what a capable and engaging stage actor he can be; his performance is one of clarity but it’s also layered: he is proud, courageous, arrogant and vain all at the same time. It’s a very physical performance, he struts and grapples, simmers and winces, and yet he always keeps something back; he won’t give of himself to the people, won’t use his scars as trophies. He bristles at the position into which he has been pushed and fumes at the people in front of whom he must display himself and lay himself bare.

Josie Rourke’s production is an intensely corporeal one, all skin and sweat and blood. It contains some striking imagery: at one point Hiddleston stands before us green-garlanded with blood rivering his face like a red masque of death; later, as the adrenaline of battle dissipates, he flinches and grits his teeth as he bathes the blood of others from his ravaged body. The choreography of the early fight scenes is slick and physical – Coriolanus and his enemy hurl each other about the stage, dashing each other to the floor – but it’s almost too slick, and there are times when you find yourself marvelling at the technical effort involved, at the clank of cutlass on cutlass, at the force with which the punches appear to land, rather than feeling any sense of the rawness and mess of warfare. (Though, at least, when they finally cast their weapons aside and grapple on the floor you do get a glimpse of this).

The cast wear a mixture of leather breastplates and tight black jeans, with neckerchiefs tied at their throats and clothing which is intentionally asymmetric. They wouldn’t look entirely out of place hanging out with Ron Perlman and Linda Hamilton in the subways of 1980s New York. Later the banished Coriolanus wears a cowl so precise in its raggedness that you can almost see the kiddie scissor marks. And, yes, there’s more than a dash of Loki the trickster in these later scenes, as he twists and infiltrates, smiling his enigmatic smile.

The supporting performances are also very strong. Coriolanus’ formidable mother Voluminia is the kind of woman who swells with pride at the thought of her son being wounded on the battlefield and Deborah Findlay gives a fittingly impassioned performance though she doesn’t have the ice-eyed majesty of Vanessa Redgrave, who played the role in the 2011 film (but, then, who does?). Mark Gatiss is soft-spoken and delicately paternal as Coriolanus’ advisor Menenius and the scene of his rejection is one of the play’s most moving, while Borgen’s Birgitte Hjort Sørensen does what she can with a role that says so much with silence, as the cast-aside wife.

The back wall of the stage is strewn with graffiti (of the actual, spray-painted kind) to which more is added digitally, the slogan “grain at our own price” multiplying and spreading as the soundtrack thumps and pounds. This feels like a misstep, a half-hearted way of insisting on the play’s ‘now-ness’ while also undermining it, and, much like the choice of costumes, making it feel oddly dated. The sense of hunger and want which underscores the text and its exploration of power and the reasons people lead don’t really need to be underlined quite so heavily.

In the end these things don’t really get in the way of what is an engaging production. Hiddleston is a compelling central figure and the visuals are very often memorable, but there’s a gloss and polish to it all, a sense of engineering which subtly undercuts its potency.

Reviewed for Exeunt

The Glass Menagerie at the Young Vic

Tennessee Williams intended The Glass Menagerie to have the texture of memory. The events of the play, as he envisioned them, would have a delicate relationship with the real, an evocative and almost expressionistic atmosphere. Music was to play a key role and a series of title cards and images were to be projected on a screen between scenes, a snippet of dialogue or a spray of blue roses. This last device was abandoned before the original staging and director Joe Hill-Gibbons does not resurrect it here, but he does attempt to honour other aspects of Williams’ ‘memory play’ through his use of lighting and music.

The production opens with a beautifully executed visual flourish, a splash of stage magic, but though a solid attempt has been made to integrate these elements into the production (that superb opening moment being a good example) some of the early scenes feel heavy and tethered. Things only really coalesce in the second half when many of the stylistic devices are dropped and Williams’ dialogue is allowed to stand alone. Amanda, the Wingfield matriarch is an ageing southern belle transplanted to a St Louis tenement but still ‘clinging frantically to another place and time’, to her girlhood in Blue Mountain where she once entertained seventeen gentlemen callers in one afternoon. Terrified that her daughter Laura, a desperately shy girl whose chief pleasures are her Victrola records and her collection of tiny glass animals, will end up an old maid, she pesters her son Tom – an overt stand-in for Williams - to invite one of his warehouse colleagues to dinner. It is the scene between Laura and the Jim, the gentleman caller, a man she hankered after at high school, which makes this production sing rather than hum. Until this point it totters along - there are moments of overplaying and sudden shifts in tone - but a kind of calm descends when Jim arrives at the door. As in his recent Young Vic production of The Beauty Queen of Leenane, Hill-Gibbins is fond of placing actors at the very front of the stage with their backs to the audience during key exchanges, thus shifting the attention to the face of the listener. In this context it’s a successful tactic, creating a connecting thread between the audience and Laura, allowing them to study her face as it relaxes and brightens. Played out against a white dividing curtain, Williams’ rich dialogue, with all its pathos, humour and warmth, is foregrounded. As Amanda, Deborah Findlay is sturdier than the mother described by Williams and she uses this as an advantage. Decked out in the lace and sparkle of her cotillion dress, she captures some of the poignant absurdity of this middle aged woman giggling and flirting with abandon, but she also captures her fierce maternal spirit, her nous (women, she declares as she buttons Laura into a hill of frills and ribbon, are “pretty traps”) and her determination to provide a secure future for her daughter. In the publicity material Sinead Matthews’ Laura is shown with glorious, almost white blonde hair, but in the production itself, she is saddled with a mousy, lumpy wig and her performance sometimes seems like a collection of tics – a limp, a (not always convincing) stutter – her fragility more external than internal, but this changes as the play progresses. When Jim arrives Laura emerges as a person: brave, funny and self-knowing. Leo Bill is angular and aggressive as Tom, the shoebox Shakespeare longing for escape; his frustration with his lot is evident even in the rapid, ravenous way in which he eats. Kyle Soller, given permission by the text to be ‘a nice ordinary young man’, is charming and self-confident as Jim, his performance less heightened than the others, his character vain but not unperceptive and not unkind, a man not unfamiliar with disappointment. Dominated by a smiling photo of the absent father in his army cap, Jeremy Herbert’s set is an inside-outside affair, combing fire escapes and raw brick walls with the trappings of the Wingfield apartment. The music is supplied live by a pianist and percussionist perched up on the gallery; the latter, appropriately, has a collection of glasses at his disposal. It is, however, the snippets of song coming from the dancehall across the street that have the biggest emotional impact. As Jim and Laura listen he asks her to dance with him and, after some hesitation, she gives in; she dances. Reviewed for musicOMH

Like a Fishbone at the Bush Theatre

Anthony Weigh’s second play, Like a Fishbone, is subtitled ‘An argument and an architectural model’, but while it does indeed contain the latter – an architectural model forms the centre of the set – the former is more elusive; it’s difficult to know just what the play’s argument is.

Like a Fishbone depicts an encounter between a renowned architect and a grieving mother. The architect has been commissioned to create a memorial for a small town that has suffered a tragedy: the massacre of a group of school children in a remote rural village by a crazed gunman.


The Architect has decided to retain the schoolhouse just as it was, with every upset chair and dropped textbook untouched. The Mother argues that this is meaningless; she would rather the building was razed to the ground.

At the heart of the play lies a discussion about the nature of architecture, over what it can and should be, whether it should be purely functional or seek greater significance. This discussion gradually grows branch upon branch, touching on faith, parenting and mourning, the things we create to help us remember. At times the bones of the play bring to mind TEAM’s recent piece, Architecting, only this time minus the exuberance and hoop skirts.

The performances are solid, but both of these women are somehow less than characters – they are mouthpieces for intentionally opposing views, outlines only sketchily filled in. The architect is a hard-edged professional, conveniently atheistic and blinkered by her belief in her project. The mother is dowdy and rumpled, equally conveniently partially sighted and driven by her religious faith and her insistance that her dead daughter deserves better.

The actors do a decent job with limited material. Deborah Findlay is appropriately stately and severe as the Architect yet she manages to – on occasion – inject a hint of warmth and even vunerability into the role. Sarah Smart is also fine as the Mother, calm and consoled by faith, but her character feels, if anything, even more contrived and unknowable. She becomes increasingly fervent in her pronouncements to the point where it threatens to derail the balance of the play in a way that was perhaps unintended; her unshakeable faith comes across as a symptom of someone losing their grip. It is left to Phoebe Waller-Bridge, as a stylish but gauche young intern, to add some necessary humour. Though hers is the smallest of three roles she succeeds in making her character feel like a person instead of a collection of ideas.

Director Josie Rourke’s clean, pared down production does provide a note of tension between the two women but she can’t keep the play from being sabotaged by its own symbolism. Weigh’s previous play for the Bush, 2,000 Feet Away, was an ambitious and intelligent if ultimately rather self-conscious examination of a community’s response to the threat of peadophilia; this follow-up lacks its heft and wit and feels more like a sketch, a blueprint, than a finished piece.

Reviewed for musicOMH