Stage productions are filmed for the cinema all the time — The Met: Live in HD, National Theatre Live and the recent West End musical “Everybody’s Talking About Jamie,” among countless others.
But Canadian director Robert Lepage’s forceful “Coriolanus,” which I first saw last summer at the Stratford Festival in Ontario, Canada, is notably different: Onscreen the tragedy looks and feels not like another celluloid archive, but a genuine film. More of a modern political thriller than a Sunday matinee, it brings to mind movies such as “All The President’s Men” or “Michael Clayton.” It goes easy on the togas.
Capturing that film genre’s shadowy intrigue is a major challenge for an obscure, dense Shakespeare play that most people don’t know exists, and has a title that makes even brandy-swilling snobs giggle. Stratford’s version, however, manages to be sexy and vicious, classic in language but contemporary in spirit. Juicy. It finds as much intensity in small expository office exchanges as the big violent speeches.
And it’s got more of those than the House of Commons during Brexit.
Caius Marcius Coriolanus (André Sills) is a successful Roman general with simmering political ambitions. Returning home victorious, his viperous mom Volumnia (Lucy Peacock) cranks his desire up to a boil by pushing him to run for consul. Coriolanus gets the gig, but soon discovers that his gruff demeanor that wins on the battlefield doesn’t go down so well in politics. He makes a mighty mess of things, and is banished. The plot — as Shakespeare’s plots tend to be — is a bit more complicated than that, but Lepage whacks the weeds with precision and clarity.
Brigit Wilson as Valeria, Lucy Peacock as Volumnia, Alexis Gordon as Virgilia and Tom McCamus as Menenius Agrippa in “Coriolanus.”David Hou
The director, who New Yorkers will remember from his 2010-2012 Ring Cycle at the Metropolitan Opera, smartly uses projections of familiar environments that give scenes a crisp realism. There’s a pub where political insiders like Brutus (Stephen Ouimette) and Velutus (Tom Rooney) gossip over light jazz, a fancy restaurant where Volumnia howls like a Real Housewife, a highway that criss-crosses the country, along with battlefields, spas and a Rush Limbaugh-like radio show. The variety is dazzling.
Though actors sometimes perform in front of flat screens, the projections have remarkable cinematic depth and texture. It’s ideal for, well, a movie.
Stratford boasts a trove of brilliant actors, who always find the truth of their language regardless of a director’s outre concept. And occasionally there are some wild ones. Here, Sills is fire incarnate as the bullish Coriolanus and brash Peacock has an almost Clintonian drive to be power-adjacent. Subtler, scheming Rooney and Ouimette are ripped from “House of Cards.”
That’s the film’s whole vibe, actually: William Shakespeare meet Frank Underwood.
