Old Play in Manhattan

Coriolanus is perhaps Shakespeare's least popular major play--which is not unfitting, since its Roman hero himself spurned popularity. It is perhaps Shakespeare's least poetic major play as well; for Coriolanus, unlike Hamlet or Macbeth, lacks imagination and tragic awareness. But a major play it decidedly is, with a Roman clang and massiveness to its story of a proud patrician hero who is denied the consulate and then banished from the city for not truckling to the plebs, and who joins his former enemies in an expedition against Rome.

Whether or not, through Coriolanus, Shakespeare vented his own presumed contempt for the common people, he was by no means taking his hero's side. The play portrays the fickle, mindless mob as the poor creature of human vanity, but it also exhibits a fiery, mindless Coriolanus as the victim of inhuman pride. Unlike the willful Lear, the willful Coriolanus cannot term himself more sinned against than sinning; also unlike Lear, he is hardened and envenomed by adversity. He is prevented from destroying Rome only by the pleadings of his mother Volumnia, who, in high Roman fashion, helps doom her child to save her fatherland.

Even the fine scene between mother and son is as masculine in its appeal as a trumpet call; it is the cello note, rather than poetry itself, that is absent from the play. Coriolanus is more Roman and less human, more heroic and less tragic than Julius Caesar or Antony and Cleopatra. Yet that is to describe rather than disparage it. Even with faults of production, this Coriolanus, as staged by Cinema Producer John (Julius Caesar) Houseman, makes a procession of graphic scenes. Its greatest weaknesses stem from miscasting. As Coriolanus, Hollywood's Robert Ryan is never large-statured or deep-fissured enough; he suggests prep school and Wall Street rather than gens and war. And though a good actress, Mildred Natwick is not a right Volumnia. Yet the play still registers.

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