After a patchy start earlier in the
year, the Royal Shakespeare Company’s season of Roman plays is now
making solid artistic returns.
Imperium,
a two-part adaptation of Robert Harris’s Cicero novels, is yet to
première, but here are the last two of the dramas by Shakespeare
et al. Al, in this case, is
Christopher Marlowe, whose seldom-seen first play tells how Aeneas,
fleeing the ruins of Troy, fetches up on the coast of what is now Libya
and becomes a plaything for various Olympian gods: Venus makes him the
love object of Carthage’s queen, whilst Jupiter orders him to press on
to Italy and found the city that will become Rome.
Marlowe is adapting wholesale (and occasionally quoting verbatim in
Latin) from Virgil’s
Aeneid,
so the play is fairly big on rhetoric. Director Kimberley Sykes twigs
this, and also has her cast give due weight to the verse metre; it’s a
nice, if coincidental, tribute to the recently deceased former RSC
supremo Sir Peter Hall that actors are end-stopping the lines as he
preferred, yet avoiding slipping into “whackty-whackty-boom”
metronomics.
Marlowe’s Dido is a palpable forerunner of Shakespeare’s Cleopatra:
there is virtually none of the skittishness, but a closely similar
possessive jealousy, death at her own hand when her dreams shatter, and
even a status as an opponent to Rome (albeit here to Rome
avant la lettre). Chipo Chung has
the measure of her character, doesn’t push too hard and whets one’s
appetite to see her play the serpent of old Nile. Opposite her, Sandy
Grierson is more usually seen in modern work, but after alternating the
two lead roles in
Doctor Faustus
for the RSC last year and now a dignified yet havering Aeneas, he’s
developing a nice sideline in Marlowe. Aeneas’s theme tune might as
well be “Should I Stay Or Should I Go?”: he changes his mind so often,
doing his best to be honourable, but the gods won’t let him. The
divinities in question include Ellie Beaven as an impassioned Venus,
spending much of the time watching over matters from just offstage in
the auditorium, and restricted-growth actor Ben Goffe as a mischievous
Cupid, who instead of using arrows or darts shoots Dido up with a
syringe.
If Aeneas shows a certain lack of poker-backed Roman civic virtues,
Caius Martius Coriolanus exhibits a terminal surfeit of them. So given
over to military exploits that he is unable to adapt to the conventions
of peacetime municipal politics, he is banished from Rome and allies
with his former foes the Volsci. Season director Angus Jackson’s
production of
Coriolanus is
clear and powerful right from the beginning: since the strife between
the patrician Roman Senate and the plebeian masses kicks off over the
corn supply, the evening opens with sacks of the stuff being hoarded
behind warehouse shutters. (It’s not often you see a bloke applauded
for driving a forklift truck, onstage or off.)
As Coriolanus’ mother and role model Volumnia, Haydn Gwynne first
appears in blouse and Oxford bags, like Katharine Hepburn at her
briskest. The weakest link, unfortunately, is Coriolanus himself. Sope
Dirisu has a decent handle on the character’s psychological journey,
and he hits the right notes of intensity at the play’s two crucial
moments – his petulant “I banish you!” to the Roman plebs and his later
agonised “Oh, mother!” speech when his family beg him not to sack Rome
– but for the bulk of his performance he lacks the vocal-musical range
and simply sounds a bit samey. Nevertheless, both this production and
the season as a whole pay off for Jackson.
Written for the Financial
Times.