Review: CORIOLANUS at Independent Shakespeare Company In Girffith Park

Pride is a real bastard. Perceived or actual. It doesn’t really matter what your resume says or how deep your battle wounds may cut. If you’re too principled to play the game, to show a little humility, it’s game over with the populous. In the context of Shakespeare’s world, that sister sin, ambition, is nearly as self-defeating. If you happen to be a high-ranking Roman solider, either one of those attributes will ultimately earn you a knife in your belly, often at the hands of someone who is prouder or more glory-coveting than you ever were. Oh, the irony.  

The individual in question is not Brutus or the title character of Shakespeare’s JULIUS CEASAR – both of whom we encounter with great regularity - but the main character of his lesser-known Roman play, CORIOLANUS. The production directed by David Melville for Independent Shakespeare Company which opens ISC’s free summer season in Griffith Park, offers a compelling case for more regular viewings. Led by Brent Charles and under the strains of an angry guitar, a dexterous 10-person cast moves us through this still timely tale about the fickleness of public opinion and mob mentality. The cages of the old LA Zoo have long sat empty, but for a couple of hours, the adjacent dell where the ISC players strut their stuff is a-roar with the civic anger of ancient Rome. The people are rioting! Is the production’s battle cry. We can relate.  

The plot of CORIOLANUS, as previously mentioned, is not as familiar as many of Shakespeare’s more frequently-performed tragedies. In brief, the Roman general Caius Martius battles his longtime nemesis, Tullus Aufidius, beating back Aufidius's threatening Volscian army and restoring a temporary peace. Martius, re-dubbed Caius Martius Coriolanus in honor of the site where this battle was won, is persuaded to seek the higher political office of Consul, only to have the scheming tribunes Sicinius and Brutus, get Coriolanus first to abase himself and then turn the people against him. Coriolanus has a plethora of noble Romans on his side - most notably his fiercely proud mother, Volumnia - urging him to be more politic, tone it down, etc. But the man being who he is, there’s only so much crow on which he is willing to dine. Matters do not end well.

In addition to taking on more prominent roles, many of Melville’s cast members take up bats, knives, pots and pans and other noise-making or saber-rattling devices to make up the plebian rabble which our high-minded Coriolanus so abhors (Those of us seated up on the risers are the patricians). They’ll quiet down temporarily when the respected senator Menenius (played by Lorenzo Gonzalez) tries to school them with his opening act parable about the role of the belly in the body politic. Otherwise, they’re mostly an angry mass.

Of course, everyone takes a step backwards when Charles’s Coriolanus enters a scene, his words dripping acid as he berates the “common cry of curs! Whose breath I hate/ As reek o’ the rotten fens, whose love I prize/As the dead carcasses of unburied men.” (Martius is one of Shakespeare's more eloquent insulters). The actor is tall, striking-looking employing a tight smile, his head cocked to one side as if anticipating a slight. A veritable war machine who owns his imperfects, Charles's Coriolanus holds the commoners in only slightly greater contempt than the patricians who are forcing him to endure those low-lifes. Charles gives plenty of depth to this prickly anti-hero. The actor is most at his ease in head-to-head battle with Patrick Batiste’s Aufidius (director Melville is also the production’s fight choreographer and composer) and – later – when he offers up himself and his services up to Aufidius and the Volscians in a scene that carries a distinct erotic charge.

The slightly gentler Coriolanus emerges in his interactions with his mother, Volumnia a character who boasts of her son’s valiantness “thou suck’dst it from me.” The interplay between Charles and Melissa Chalsma’s Volumnia is similarly charged. She has some limited power over him, and he knows it and doesn’t chafe against it. The production takes pains to note that the salvation of Rome is due not singularly to Volumnia’s sway over her son, but to the other women in Coriolanus’s life as well (Justine Faith, playing his wife Virgilia has a role as well.) Not a factor this time: our hero’s progeny. In the editing of the text, Melville has eliminated Coriolanus’s son, young Martius.

Bringing the production in at around 2.5 hours, Melville’s staging is consistently clear-headed and easily tracked. Without lighter subplots or other bits of levity to lean into, the season-opening tragedy is largely an all business experience for ISC where blankets, picnics and intermission parties often give productions a decidedly festive air. That’s cool. Revelry figures to be in abundant supply when COMEDY OF ERRORS arrives in August.

Until then, sit back and drink in – yet again - a tale of massive civic discontent and the deeply flawed leaders who don’t know how to address it.

COROILANUS plays through July 26 in Griffith Park. 

To post a comment, you must register and login.

Don't Miss a Los Angeles News Story
Sign up for all the news on the Summer season, discounts & more...

Los Angeles News

Get the latest news, discounts & more