With the live stream of Coriolanus just a day ahead, Tom did an interview with The Guardian! You can read the full interview at the link provided below!
Coriolanus is a play that’s more respected than revered. Why does it have a rather difficult reputation?
Coriolanus is relentless, brutal, savage and serious, but that’s why I find it interesting. Shakespeare sets the play in ancient Rome: a far older place than the Rome more familiar to us – of Julius Caesar or Antony and Cleopatra or the later Empire. This Rome is wild. A city-state wrestling with its identity. An early Rome of famine, war and tyranny.
In the central character, Caius Martius Coriolanus, Shakespeare shows how the power of unchecked rage corrodes, dehumanises and ultimately destroys its subject. I’ve read that some find Martius a hard character to like, or to relate to – less effective at evoking an audience’s sympathy than Hamlet, Romeo, Juliet, Rosalind, Othello or Lear. Yet there is a perverse integrity and purity to be found in his obstinacy and honour, which sits alongside his arrogance and contempt.
The play’s poetry is raw and visceral, quite different from the elegance, beauty, clarity and charm found elsewhere in Shakespeare’s work. The warmth and delight to be found in his comedies are absent here. But the unstinting seriousness and intensity of the play is what makes it fascinating….
