DIDO, QUEEN OF CARTHAGE / CORIOLANUS
Swan Theatre / Royal Shakespeare Theatre, Stratford-upon-Avon
Opened 21 September, 2017
*** / ***

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.

Copyright © Ian Shuttleworth; all rights reserved.

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