If toxic masculinity is the sole driving force shaping Coriolanus’ persona then this new production by Bell Shakespeare is a solid success. If the character, as written by Shakespeare, contains some more wayward and nuanced character traits, then this production fails to mine them. It is, however, a successful staging, directed by Peter Evans, who also designed the stage setting.
The rectangular performance area of the Neilsen Nutshell, with Plebeian or Patrician audience members ranked on either long side (framed as participants in the political drama) allows for a deep acting channel with movable plinth rolled from end to end – so that each scene change is strongly demarcated. Sometimes the whole cast have their back to half of the audience but not as often as last year’s disappointing King Lear. So, engagement between actors and audience was simply enacted. Diction was generally good across the cast. The dark humour of the work was consistently realised through attention to its rich array of similes .
Hazem Shammas captured the seething warrior energy that flows through the veins of Coriolanus – groomed as a young boy into an automaton for war by his blood hungry mother who has crafted his personality. The aphrodisiac of glory incites them both.
Brigid Zengeni brings an elegant edge to his patrician mother, Volumnia, gliding across the stage, recounting her sons’ muscular deeds (over and over he has “proved himself a man”) relishing how she shaped him, proudly revelling in his wounds and the visceral gore that a warrior clan smear so voraciously on their naked flesh.
Mother and son exude partnership. Coriolanus’s wife Virgilia appears a weak third appendage in their household, thought she has produced a son who will tread the same fleet footed role as the warrior to be.
The high-octane energy of Shammas’ assumption, hungrily gobbling up Shakespeare language in loud and stressful speech patterns, presents an unrelenting, blood curdling warrior. Searing but one-sided. His market speech, clad in humble robes, seeking the support of the Plebians, failed to excavate much humour, the seething anger suffocating everything.
His nuggetty muscular frame supports this study in violence, but he is hard pressed to find the tragedy lurking within his downfall. There is no querulous tone to his performance as his manhood comes undone on the rocks of civil society. No gradations when he becomes an object to gaze upon and interrogate, as opposed to a force. The exile scene didn’t mount much of an emotional punch, while the surrender to his mother at the end of the siege of Rome failed to ignite little pity or catharsis. It didn’t help that he did not face any audience members during this section of the play. There was a certain mechanical gait to this Coriolanus’ utterances, like a man trekking the heights and measuring ascent and distances with angry detachment.
Likewise, the power of the words that Shakespeare gives to Volumnia were well articulated by Zengeni, but no great emotional depth was instantiated. This may be the cool patrician veneer that staunches deep emotion via the practice of emotional control, but this great scene of visceral redemption underwhelmed. The cadences and emotional terrain were too regulated.
Anthony Taufa as Aufidius was too gentle and soft voiced to inspire fear, while his diction in the first half left a lot to be desired. Yet, in the second half of the evening, diction improved, and the semblance of his character’s strategic cunning was flecked in by gesture and responsiveness to events unfolding outside him. The homoerotic charge between Coriolanus and Aufidius - “thou noble thing, now dances my rapt heart” and “I present my throat to thee” - was barely sketched. This surrender and reshaping of Coriolanus’ role and power after his exile from Rome was enacted with the barest flicker of intensity.
Martha Ridgeway and Marco Chiappi bought a touch of dark humour to their assumptions of the Tribunes (Sicinius and Brutus). His dark voice and her sharp wit were spread fulsomely over their political intrigue and incitements to rebellion, Their dogged calculation was nicely etched: "Now we have shown our power/ Let us seem humbler after it is done /Than when it was a-doing”. The populace of Rome was smartly essayed by a small ensemble. Ridgeway was broadly comic in her cameo as Valeria.
Gareth Reeves was a cool-headed Consul (Cominius), handsome, strategic and unable to quell the arrogance that dominates the vibe of Coriolanus’ victor takes all approach to governance. His diction, however, was sometimes low key.
Peter Carroll almost stole the show as Menenius. His comic timing was impeccable. The character’s staggering verbosity, pregnant pauses and repetitions of key phrases were placed like lingering verbal music. His clannish cleverness, Patrician to his core, though modulated by his years of political experience, was starkly amusing. His belly speech – a complexity of similes and bodily eruptions was a triumph of sophistry: the diction aligned with the biting wit and intellectual intent. His abandonment by Coriolanus at the Volscian’s camp was of the few moving moments of defeat that unnerved us and the wily old man.
Septimus Caton’s cavernous voice and overbearing stature played nicely for Titus Larcius and his patrician mockery. As Virgilia, Suzannah McDonald was a handsome patrician wife, but her relationship with power was not particularly elucidated. Her beseeching speech to Coriolanus - on the outskirts of Rome - was well articulated, but as we did not sense the current of their relationship - his stiff dismissal and her departure didn’t raise the temperature. Jules Billington was an effective member of the ensemble.
The large-scale textual projections on the acting floor were highly effective. The costuming (Ella Butler) bought forth a clear demarcation of the Patricians and the Plebeians – though the peasantry/working class seemed rather well dressed. The ill-fitting, upmarket suited apparel for the Tribune 'pollies on the rise' was nicely judged.
The lighting (Amelia Lever-Davidson) underscored the everchanging patterns of political engagement – across the public and private domains of the protagonists. The use of large-scale curtaining at one end of the rectangular performance area was simple and satisfying, particularly for the exile scene, when all are gauzed and slightly muffled by its effect. The sounds of the curtain opening and shutting launched its own visceral element. The fight scenes (Nigel Poulton) were effectively choreographed but why we had blood smeared everywhere on Coriolanus at his dramatic victory over the Volscian’s, but no such blood when he is butchered by the same tribe – was rather odd.
The dense political rhetoric is clearly elucidated in this production. And if the anti-hero fails to deliver a multi-dimensional statesman, we can at least be assaulted by the awesome power of his deranged masculinity, safely, in the theatre, knowing that “violent military combat operates outside political and social norms”, though unsure how such a warrior qualifies for hero status when he is so permanently angry and suffocating on it. Is that all there is? Or is there more to this work than the current Bell Shakespeare production mines?
Bell Shakespeare Company, Nielsen Nutshell, Wharf 2/3 Sydney, 17 July, 2025
Gar Jones
The rectangular performance area of the Neilsen Nutshell, with Plebeian or Patrician audience members ranked on either long side (framed as participants in the political drama) allows for a deep acting channel with movable plinth rolled from end to end – so that each scene change is strongly demarcated. Sometimes the whole cast have their back to half of the audience but not as often as last year’s disappointing King Lear. So, engagement between actors and audience was simply enacted. Diction was generally good across the cast. The dark humour of the work was consistently realised through attention to its rich array of similes .
Hazem Shammas captured the seething warrior energy that flows through the veins of Coriolanus – groomed as a young boy into an automaton for war by his blood hungry mother who has crafted his personality. The aphrodisiac of glory incites them both.
Brigid Zengeni brings an elegant edge to his patrician mother, Volumnia, gliding across the stage, recounting her sons’ muscular deeds (over and over he has “proved himself a man”) relishing how she shaped him, proudly revelling in his wounds and the visceral gore that a warrior clan smear so voraciously on their naked flesh.
Mother and son exude partnership. Coriolanus’s wife Virgilia appears a weak third appendage in their household, thought she has produced a son who will tread the same fleet footed role as the warrior to be.
The high-octane energy of Shammas’ assumption, hungrily gobbling up Shakespeare language in loud and stressful speech patterns, presents an unrelenting, blood curdling warrior. Searing but one-sided. His market speech, clad in humble robes, seeking the support of the Plebians, failed to excavate much humour, the seething anger suffocating everything.
His nuggetty muscular frame supports this study in violence, but he is hard pressed to find the tragedy lurking within his downfall. There is no querulous tone to his performance as his manhood comes undone on the rocks of civil society. No gradations when he becomes an object to gaze upon and interrogate, as opposed to a force. The exile scene didn’t mount much of an emotional punch, while the surrender to his mother at the end of the siege of Rome failed to ignite little pity or catharsis. It didn’t help that he did not face any audience members during this section of the play. There was a certain mechanical gait to this Coriolanus’ utterances, like a man trekking the heights and measuring ascent and distances with angry detachment.
Likewise, the power of the words that Shakespeare gives to Volumnia were well articulated by Zengeni, but no great emotional depth was instantiated. This may be the cool patrician veneer that staunches deep emotion via the practice of emotional control, but this great scene of visceral redemption underwhelmed. The cadences and emotional terrain were too regulated.
Anthony Taufa as Aufidius was too gentle and soft voiced to inspire fear, while his diction in the first half left a lot to be desired. Yet, in the second half of the evening, diction improved, and the semblance of his character’s strategic cunning was flecked in by gesture and responsiveness to events unfolding outside him. The homoerotic charge between Coriolanus and Aufidius - “thou noble thing, now dances my rapt heart” and “I present my throat to thee” - was barely sketched. This surrender and reshaping of Coriolanus’ role and power after his exile from Rome was enacted with the barest flicker of intensity.
Martha Ridgeway and Marco Chiappi bought a touch of dark humour to their assumptions of the Tribunes (Sicinius and Brutus). His dark voice and her sharp wit were spread fulsomely over their political intrigue and incitements to rebellion, Their dogged calculation was nicely etched: "Now we have shown our power/ Let us seem humbler after it is done /Than when it was a-doing”. The populace of Rome was smartly essayed by a small ensemble. Ridgeway was broadly comic in her cameo as Valeria.
Gareth Reeves was a cool-headed Consul (Cominius), handsome, strategic and unable to quell the arrogance that dominates the vibe of Coriolanus’ victor takes all approach to governance. His diction, however, was sometimes low key.
Peter Carroll almost stole the show as Menenius. His comic timing was impeccable. The character’s staggering verbosity, pregnant pauses and repetitions of key phrases were placed like lingering verbal music. His clannish cleverness, Patrician to his core, though modulated by his years of political experience, was starkly amusing. His belly speech – a complexity of similes and bodily eruptions was a triumph of sophistry: the diction aligned with the biting wit and intellectual intent. His abandonment by Coriolanus at the Volscian’s camp was of the few moving moments of defeat that unnerved us and the wily old man.
Septimus Caton’s cavernous voice and overbearing stature played nicely for Titus Larcius and his patrician mockery. As Virgilia, Suzannah McDonald was a handsome patrician wife, but her relationship with power was not particularly elucidated. Her beseeching speech to Coriolanus - on the outskirts of Rome - was well articulated, but as we did not sense the current of their relationship - his stiff dismissal and her departure didn’t raise the temperature. Jules Billington was an effective member of the ensemble.
The large-scale textual projections on the acting floor were highly effective. The costuming (Ella Butler) bought forth a clear demarcation of the Patricians and the Plebeians – though the peasantry/working class seemed rather well dressed. The ill-fitting, upmarket suited apparel for the Tribune 'pollies on the rise' was nicely judged.
The lighting (Amelia Lever-Davidson) underscored the everchanging patterns of political engagement – across the public and private domains of the protagonists. The use of large-scale curtaining at one end of the rectangular performance area was simple and satisfying, particularly for the exile scene, when all are gauzed and slightly muffled by its effect. The sounds of the curtain opening and shutting launched its own visceral element. The fight scenes (Nigel Poulton) were effectively choreographed but why we had blood smeared everywhere on Coriolanus at his dramatic victory over the Volscian’s, but no such blood when he is butchered by the same tribe – was rather odd.
The dense political rhetoric is clearly elucidated in this production. And if the anti-hero fails to deliver a multi-dimensional statesman, we can at least be assaulted by the awesome power of his deranged masculinity, safely, in the theatre, knowing that “violent military combat operates outside political and social norms”, though unsure how such a warrior qualifies for hero status when he is so permanently angry and suffocating on it. Is that all there is? Or is there more to this work than the current Bell Shakespeare production mines?
Bell Shakespeare Company, Nielsen Nutshell, Wharf 2/3 Sydney, 17 July, 2025
Gar Jones
