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It's said melodrama is the struggle between right and wrong and tragedy the struggle between right and right. The trouble with Coriolanus, as Eric Bentley once pointed out, is it is a struggle between wrong and wrong.
No melodrama. Nor even tragedy because, charismatic as Coriolanus might be, he can be a pretty nasty piece of work. Likewise, the people are shown as a smelly, stupid and easily led mob. Shakespeare even finds time for comedy. But never sentiment and no easy solutions.
On the surface, this is the story of the brilliantly individualistic Coriolanus who rides roughshod over the people, who exact their revenge by exiling him.
But Coriolanus joins forces with his former enemy, the Voscan Aufidius, to attack Rome. Coriolanus concedes, however, after the intercession of his family. The fickle mob are suitably shamed and Aufidius in a fury fixes up Coriolanus for good.
Beneath the surface, though, is a fascinating political dialectic which has made the play so intriguing to modern directors; Shakespeare wrote the play during a grain famine and the popular uprising against Coriolanus loosely parallels contemporary events.
It is this allure that produced Brecht's famous version and, more recently, Michael Bogdanov's stunning production for the English Shakespeare Company (seen at the Perth Festival two years ago) set during the Polish Solidarity uprising. Indeed, the two tribunes of the people who fan the revolt against Coriolanus are remarkably prescient of modern labour leaders.
Gale Edwards' version is something of a curate's egg and it left me with the feeling that it lacks a point of view, either theatrically or thematically. Along the way, though, there are some very impressive moments and performances.
Edwards uses the image of a little boy playing with a sword - Coriolanus's son - to punctuate the play. It hints at those TV images of children in the world's hot spots firing off real guns as though they were toys.
It is a strong image, especially when it opens the play. Unfortunately, it has little to do with a play that is really about the dialectics of character and power, the collective and the individual.
Philip Quast plays Aufidius with conviction and vocal control. He and Dinah Shearing (as Volumnia) display the kind of stagecraft an unruly play like this needs.
Danny Adcock and Peter Cummins are also splendid as the tribunes. The problem, though, is they are treated wholly negatively rather than as leaders of the people, both clever and honourable in their own way.
A similar problem arises with John Gaden's Menenius, the aristocrat who gets on with the people and who urges everyone to "proceed by process". Gaden is excellent, but only excellent in presenting Menenius as an unrealistic fop, which seems to me to undermine the serious function he is meant to fulfil as the mediator in a potentially destructive struggle between democracy and aristocracy.
It is a production which gets better as it goes along, especially in the second half when Quast and Shearing pull it together. But the narrative line is totally obscure for a long time at the beginning and Edwards seems more concerned with indulgent images than establishing the key dramatic points.
John Howard must bear some blame as well. His Coriolanus is a muddle-mouthed mutton head with a bad temper rather than a brilliant hero. He is largely oblivious to the metre of the verse and this, together with his continuous blustering, make things hard to follow early on.
This must be a post-modern production, I think - which is to say, a theatrical version of the I Ching where you throw all the sticks up in the air and assume that, despite appearances, the resulting mess of sticks on the ground makes some sense.
