Coriolanus performed by the Donmar Warehouse (review)

Since its inception in 2009, NT Live has been engaged in a pioneering balancing act in its live remediation of theater productions for the cinema. The camerawork has advanced from the static, face-hugging close-ups of Helen Mirren in Phèdreto the kinetic wirework that dynamized the battles in Kenneth Branagh’s 2013 Macbeth, and the programming of new writing, family productions, and lesser-known Shakespeare plays alongside major tragedies has ensured a diverse portfolio and range of audiences.

The series’ weakness, however, has been an anxiety over reception. The international audience of millions is required to watch explanatory interviews and features before and during the production in an attempt to ensure interpretation is as homogeneous as possible. For this screening of the Donmar’s Coriolanus, presenter Emma Freud joined director Josie Rourke on the darkened set during the interval to giggle (literally) over the casting of MTV’s “Sexiest Man Alive,” Tom Hiddleston, in the title role, and to demand the audience reward the production with a standing ovation. Consciously or not, Freud’s attempt to elicit the collective voice of a mass audience resonated with a production that utilized the focusing, fetishizing power of the film camera to accentuate the play’s own concern with controlling response.

To diminish response to drooling over a lead actor may seem reductive; and yet the acknowledgement of the enthusiasm for Hiddleston’s casting wasn’t entirely gratuitous. The camera lingered on Hiddleston’s body, especially in a prolonged image following the battle for Corioles as he stripped to the waist and painstakingly showered the blood from his face and body. At the screening I attended, the collective intake of breath was deafening. Rourke’s production imagined Coriolanus not as a grizzled war veteran in the vein of Greg Hicks (2007) or Ralph Fiennes (2011), but as a charismatic young leader. Fresh from playing Henry V in the BBC’s The Hollow Crown(2012), Hiddleston’s incitement of his troops’ valour in front of Corioles (innovatively flipped by ninety degrees so that the invading soldiers scaled ladders and disappeared through the Donmar’s ceiling) involved him locking eyes with a handful of soldiers, employing his soft, clear voice to imply a personal relationship with each. Soldiers were driven by desire for their leader, a desire shared alike by Birgitte Hjort Sørensen’s Virgilia, who passionately reclaimed him on his return from Corioles, and Hadley Fraser’s Aufidius, who also welcomed the defecting Roman with a prolonged kiss.

The camera and cast thus collaborated in the mediation of Martius’s image. The extraordinary Brutus and Sicinia of Elliot Levey and Helen Schlesinger became hysterical auteurs, whipping the citizens into frenzies of anger and disdain before kissing one another ecstatically. They framed Martius in a tiny square, painted on the stage, to face the people and deliver his defence. Martius accepted the framing without question but turned it back on his detractors. Apart from a single screamed “I banish you” he maintained his calm, receptive posture, demanding even of those who had rejected him that they come closer, as close as the lingering camera, to hear the nuances of his scorn.

In moments such as this, NT Live demonstrates that it is no mere mediating platform, but a creative reinterpretation of a production. The captive attention enforced on an audience by the unblinking close focus of a hi-definition camera insists upon the priority of the individual character over the broader picture. This is a danger in those moments when miseen-scèneis sacrificed...