[quote] I saw the Donmar Coriolanus. Hiddleston was good [...] Hiddleston didn't compare favourably with them. He spent a lot of time strutting around trying to be very alpha as if this was the one and only quality of his character.
R524, was this the main flaw that you saw in the portrayal of the character? Because there are 2 issues here:
(1) If a stage actor spends a “lot of time” doing something on stage (e.g. ominously strutting around) - that’s usually the director’s precise direction. Stage actors don’t generally just do anything they fancy on stage - they follow the director’s vision.
Donmar’s Josie Rourke was the director of that production and her vision was (clearly intentionally) to present the Roman general and national war hero as an aloof, elitist, stoic, hyper-alpha military type (which is the traditional reading of that character). And Rourke’s production purposefully underscored the general’s alpha military quality and status even more. IIRC (it was years ago that I saw it), that production even opened with a scene of Coriolanus completely drenched in post-battle blood (his own mixed with his enemies’). That opening symbolism intentionally and expressly set the ‘alpha warrior’ tone straight away.
Was there nuance and subtlety? Yes, as far as I recall. His scenes with his Roman family (mother & wife), where he questioned his militaristic ideology and his own arrogant convictions, etc.
(2) “Coriolanus” is a play which is not staged too often precisely because many consider it not to be Shakespeare’s finest play - because the main protagonist is (inherently) not fleshed out well in the play’s speeches (whereas speeches are the main tool of character development in Shakespeare’s other plays). The premise of the character’s internal & social conflict (turning from a national hero into a national traitor, because of his supremacist class elitism, and then back again into a self-sacrificing hero) is quite interesting. However, the play’s monologues, dialogues and overall storyline lack the same level of psychological depth, subtle explanation of possible motives and emotional ‘punch’ as e.g. “Hamlet”. Shakespeare doesn’t give Coriolanus the same level of juicy, soul-revealing material as he gives Hamlet or Macbeth, in terms of agonising, self-questioning monologues, even though their internal conflicts (betrayal of their respective nations) are all somewhat similar.
Theatre critics say the following about the protagonist in “Coriolanus” in general: “The warrior Coriolanus is perhaps the most opaque of Shakespeare's tragic heroes, rarely pausing to soliloquise or reveal [his] motives [...] In this way, he is less like the effervescent and reflective Shakespearean heroes/heroines [... e.g. Hamlet], and more like figures from ancient classical literature such as [...] Aeneas [...] Readers and playgoers have often found him an unsympathetic character.”
Despite these inherent limitation in terms of the play’s narration, structure and character writing, I think Hiddleston did an excellent job with the Shakespearean material he had. He actually made a vaguely-written, inconsistent, class-supremacist protagonist emotionally understandable, even likeable and resonant to an extent, when I saw it at least. And his portrayal seemed to resonate with the critics as well.
