Kristina Bedford’s “Coriolanus” at The National (42.4, no. 215, Winter 1992, p. 58)

Kristina Bedford’s book (Cranbury, NJ: Susquehanna University Press, 1992. 351 pp. $55.00) is an account of the evolution of Sir Peter Hall’s production of Coriolanus, which had a long run at the National Theater, London, from 15 December 1984 to 25 August 1985, a production which was taken to Athens for two performances (20-1 Sept 1985). The lead role was taken by the ebullient Ian McKellen, and Irene Worth played his formidable mother, Volumnia. A stage-historian trying to put this production into perspective would rank it below Olivier’s 1959 performance, with its famous death-moment, when Olivier, run through by swords, fell forward off a platform, was grabbed by three Volscians, and dangled by the ankles twelve feet above stage. (Hall directed both Olivier and McKellen.) On the other hand, a historian would rank this 1984 production above the portrayal at Stratford-upon-Avon by Ian Hogg in 1972, who thought of Coriolanus as John McEnroe, Mohammed Ali, and Lawrence of Arabia all rolled into one. Not surprisingly, Hogg seemed unable to reach the nobility, passion, or magnetism of the role.

Hall’s fair-to-middling production is, however, given the honor of a book-length study, and no explanation for this odd disproportion is offered. For this show, I would myself have produced a slim paperback (to keep the cost down to $20), but Kristina Bedford evidently considered the Hall production a classic. Her book usefully offers us cast-lists, a chapter on rehearsals, five chapters on the play’s five acts in performance, McKellen and Greg Hicks (Aufidius) talking about the play, the Athens reprise, and a nearly 150-page “Diary of the Rehearsal Process.” A stage-historian, however, might get little from the book that could not be had from reviews, except for the important matters of the exact dates of the run, the decision to keep the homoerotic element minor, the heart attack Coriolanus suffered, the Athenian engagement, the appearance of the stage, and the photographic highlights of stage action. Of course, rehearsals are a very specialized interest, and probably only some future historian of twentieth-century theater will mine this lode.

As noted, one can consult reviewers and other writers on this production. These reviewers found it to be a balanced debate, a sort of centrist interpretation (neither Labour nor Tory), and decidedly quirky. It featured an ad hoc, on-stage crowd of ninety audience members for the plebs, who were often too well dressed to be convincing. Coriolanus fought with a saber in act 1, but was killed by a hail of bullets in act 5, raising the possibility that an offstage technological revolution had taken place in the interim. The hero huddled in a blanket at the end of Act I after his supposed superhuman feats at Corioli, and, most wonderful of all, he gave up easily at Antium because he had just suffered a heart attack. (Hall found the heart attack in Coriolanus’ words, “Measurable Liar, thou hast made my heart/ Too great for what contains it.” McKellen indicated that this was indeed a reference to cardiac arrest by pronouncing all his lines after that with slurred speech. Thus the great and foolish sneer “Like an eagle in a dovecote, I/ Flutter’d your Volscians in Corioli!” was evidently spoken as a half-drunk man might speak it.) It strikes one as appallingly cruel to shoot down a man who has just had a cardiac arrest with advanced weaponry the likes of which he had never seen in his life.

A good account of the production is that by Clare-Marie Wall (“Script, Performance, Perception: The Textual Interplay of Coriolanus,” a University of Colorado dissertation [DAI 48/05a], 1987). This work is free from any bias in favor of Hall, and instead bases its account on “three central performance signs: the City, Solitariness, and Performance. Expressed by set, blocking, costume, gesture, intonation, silences, and so on, these signs sometimes reflect the script, sometimes contradict it, sometimes remain autonomous.” While the study suffers from the notion that Coriolanus is not so much a stable written text as “a series of collaborative events,” it stands back much farther from the production than the Bedford account. It certainly seems a lack in Kristina Bedford’s book that it nowhere mentions this other account of Hall’s production; Clare-Marie Wall must have sat through as many performances as Kristina Bedford, and my guess is that they knew of one another’s work.

Other shortcomings mark the book. To begin with, it is shot through with errors, beginning on page 13, where the opening night is said to be in 1985 instead of 1984. Kristina Bedford splits infinitives with abandon. There are frequent misspellings; colloquialism and cliché abound; even malapropism appears from time to time. And, sadly, Dr. Bedford exhibits a foul mouth and is prepared to report Greg Hicks’s, too.

However, the most serious problem is a confusion of approach in chapters 2-6, the moment-by-moment account of stage action and the part that will be most read. Kristina Bedford has simply not decided what her stance ought to be in this section. Occasionally she is a biographer: “Shakespeare is in favour of a single monarch as ruler of the nation, with the proviso that he be balanced in head and heart as well as by the aristocracy and the people” (79). (To which E.K.Chambers and Samuel Schoenbaum might respond, “How can you know a little fact like that?”) Sometimes she is a confiding scholar: “This marks the only cut from the production which, to me, detracts from the power of any passage” (85), or a speculative one: “If Coriolanus were to be killed [at Rome], the patricians would split the country and the people would lose their power” (92). Sometimes again she is a poetical reader in a study, as she contemplates “Publicola . . . chaste as the icicle’: “The image is precise, referring to particular icicles on a specific temple” (127).

Beyond these small confusions of identity, a larger bias appears: Having been close to Hall’s rehearsals almost daily for nearly two months, Kristina Bedford frequently watches the play through his eyes. There are few warnings when she is doing this. A serious example occurs in her discussion of 2.2, where Coriolanus has won Senate confirmation of his consulship but must still win the plebeians’ votes in the marketplace. She tells us that “Shakespeare has created an extreme example of the traditional warrior-hero posited at an extreme moment in time, when the ideals of the past can no longer be recreated as the people and the tribunes will not allow it to happen” (72). She adds that Hall took this view in rehearsals. As there is nothing in the text to support this view, its inclusion can be ascribed entirely to the late twentieth-century opinion that, by common consent, your military strongman is your doomed dinosaur. I can say, after a survey of much of the criticism written on the play, that this is only one view, and it competes with at least half-a-dozen other views as to why Coriolanus fails to become consul. If one happens not to share this view, one is depressed to see it stated as gospel.

Commentary, then, is freely mingled with a camera-like account. I believe, even in this age of videotapes, that few small-college library budgets will permit purchase of the videotape version of this production (even supposing one is available). Kristina Bedford was therefore to be our eyes at the Olivier Theatre in London and tell us what happened. All her other roles–biographer, confidante, critic, director’s protégé—should have been separated out in some way. To offset her always-positive response to the production, she ought to have abandoned her lengthy jottings on the rehearsal process and instead given us at least the reviews by the London papers.

Theater historians will want to make use of this account in their own stage-histories of Coriolanus, but they must use it with care, reading around the many passages where the protean observer has shifted into a new shape. The account will also be useful for Shakespeare instructors who missed the London production. Yet if anyone suggested that a regular shelf of such books be started, 350 pages per long-running show, I would demur. As Henry IV usefully reminds us, “A little more than a little is by much too much.”