Coriolanus
The Royal Shakespeare Theatre
Stratford-Upon-Avon
HHHII
This production concludes the RSC’s season of the “Roman” plays, Shakespeare’s epic analyses of the chemistry of personality, politics and power.
 Of the quartet — Titus Andronicus, Julius Caesar, Antony and Cleopatra and Coriolanus — the last most tellingly demonstrates Bertholt Brecht’s statement: “pity the land that needs heroes.”
James Corrigan’s Aufidius, Coriolanus’s mortal foe, speaks of “the interpretation of the time” and Angus Jackson’s production is in tune with the age of Trump, with Sope Dirisu’s war-machine warrior allowing no place for nobility.
When not slaughtering Rome’s enemies with fiendish enthusiasm, this Coriolanus is all arrogance, with a boorish contempt for the lower orders of the Roman citizenry.
In Jackson’s reading of the play,  there is no empathy, let alone sympathy, for this adolescently retarded   sociopath. He’s dominated by his mother, Volumnia (Haydn Gwynne) who, if she had a dozen sons, would “rather see eleven die nobly for their country than one voluptuously surfeit out of action.”
There is however a trace of tragic irony when she realises that her final successful appeal to her hitherto intransigent and banished son for reconciliation — who’s now returned with Aufidius’s Volscian forces to wreak vengeance on Rome — will almost certainly destroy him.
Favoured by the nazis, this is a play that has lent itself to both right and, understandably, more often left-wing interpretations.
But here, from the opening, when we see mountains of grain being forklifted into the caged warehouse, there is little attempt to balance the actions or values dividing aristocrats and starving plebeians.
Even the manipulation of the people by Jackie Morrison’s and Martina Laird’s Tribunes, determined to oust this potential tyrant, appears less personally motivated than in many productions.
There are moments of humour, captured in the turncoat Coriolanus’s embarrassment at Aufidius’s homoerotic welcoming embrace to his Volscian forces, and emotional tension — the long silence before his final anguished surrender to his mother’s pleas: “O mother, mother! What have you done?”
But otherwise this fast-moving, strangely old-fashioned production breaks no new ground, though it holds the attention throughout.
Runs until October 6, box office: rsc.org.uk, then at London’s  Barbican Centre, Novenber 6-18, box office: barbican.org.uk