Becoming the Mob: Mike Brookes and Mike Pearson's Coriolan/us

People milling about, chatting. Drizzly rain. The bang of port-o-potty doors. The rustle of paper. Smells of beer, wet earth, water. Huge blue doors. More people. Headphones? Laughter. Excitement. Disquiet. Wonder. Brrrr. And then, pushing from behind, WHAT? A horn honking, WHERE? Swiveling our heads to see . . . a Van?! driving through the assembled masses? OUT OF THE WAY! Blue doors sliding open, visions of a throng of people on movie screens football fields away. That's US! And then we're in. The "play" has begun.

Hangar 858, RAF St. Athan, in the Vale of Glamorgan, Wales, was the site of Mike Brookes and Mike Pearson's 2012 production Coriolan/us, produce?d by the National Theatre Wales in association with the Royal Shakespeare Company, commissioned for the World Shakespeare Festival. A conflation of Shakespeare's Coriolanus and Brecht's adaptation titled Coriolan, the action of the play (both dramatic and physical) is located predominantly in public spaces replete with crowds of supporters and/or detractors. From the beginning, the principle concept driving the production was the mobs embedded in the architecture of the two texts, which informed the scale and scope of the site and, in turn, determined the use of multimedia within the production. In this article, I explore how the aircraft hangar and installed scenic elements as well as the collective movement through the space by the audience/viewers and the performers, combined with projected images and sound piped through headphones, invited us to reimagine our (the audience/viewers') place and identity in Pearson and Brookes's world of Coriolan/us.¹

The crowds of people prominent in both Shakespeare's original text, appearing in twenty-five out of twenty-nine scenes, and Brecht's adaptation, wherein "the people" are the focus of the action, spurred Brookes and Pearson's interest in the plays. In the Coriolan/us program, Mike Brookes explains how this central image of the masses influenced the production. "In our imaginings, from the inception of this work, Coriolan/us was always going to unfold amongst a crowd, as it moved and flowed around the open public space of this event."² Mike Pearson, in his article "National Theatre of Wales's Coriolan/us: A 'Live Film,'" noted how crowded the world of Shakespeare's Coriolanus is and remarked on the multiplicity of generalized public locations (battlefields, streets, marketplaces, and the like) required by the text.³ Based on these and other features found in the texts of the plays, Pearson recounts that the "decision was made . . . to regard the audience from time to time and unwittingly perhaps, as citizens, army, bystanders, film extras, etc., and to achieve the production . . . with only two Citizens and two Tribunes . . . No massed supernumeraries, no rioters, no foot soldiers to hinder the momentum of the events."⁴ Thus, the audience/viewers were, from the first, cast in the role of the populace of Rome, the body politic, citizens, soldiers, and rioters, to occupy, inhabit, and define the public spaces within and upon which the action takes place.

Additionally, the movement of these multitudes figured in the imagining of the production. In the program notes, Brookes articulates a dynamic movement flowing through an open space, "act following act, one then leading another, the rolling consequences of our choices and reactions accumulating as they ripple on through the body and structure of a social forum constituted by all those present" (emphasis mine).⁵ This social forum, the various peoples of ancient Rome, was to be created, in theory and in practice, in large part by the choices in movement the audience/viewers made as they negotiated the site, physically, mentally, and emotionally, in response to the production choices, the complex choreography of the performers, and the architecture of the aircraft hangar.

To accommodate the flowing movement of the imagined crowds of Rome as well as the scope of the action of the play, Brookes and Pearson sought a large, wide-open space that could be easily traversed. Brookes states, "It was always going to happen to scale. A large open place...