ARTS NIGHT.

Saw Coriolanus (now closed) at the Shakespeare Theatre Company here in D.C. I'd seen this play twice before -- back in the 70s at the Public, with Clarence Williams III in the lead, and at Theatre for a New Audience in 2005 with Christian Camargo, on which occasion I wrote about the play and the production. (You know the story: Big tough soldier saves Rome, Rome shits on him, soldier joins Rome's enemies and threatens to destroy Rome, his mother talks him out of it and his new comrades, understandably pissed, kill him.)

The play isn't wearing well on me --though it was a rattling good production, if a little heavy on the grrr-we're-guards type of ridiculous pseudo-toughness you get when actors play war; also the final dumb-show was imbecilic, a cycle-of-violence thing out of some pacifist pageant.

The character doesn't have the depth and shadings of Shakespeare's other tragic heroes, so the critical mind usually wanders away from him and toward the play's sour view of democracy and politics, which is not even cynical, just superstitious, reflexively hostile and grim. The other kinds of human relations the play notices are either sketchy or monstrous. Menenius and Coriolanus are supposed to be practically family, but Menenius does all the work and when the fit is on him Coriolanus gives him up easily; the love-hate blood-brotherhood of Aufidius and Coriolanus is just creepy.

The relationship that usually gets all the attention is the hero's to his mother Volumnia, a sort of paragon of martial motherhood who brags that she instilled Coriolanus' blood-thirst, and we believe her because she's formidable with her family, a terror to her enemies, and galvanic to Coriolanus. (His wife Virgilia was more wan and disposable in this production than I'd seen her before.) Diane D’Aquila was wonderful in the role; patrician but ferociously energetic, the sort of person you'd expect Coriolanus to look up to.

But a funny thing happened to that relationship because of a choice Patrick Page made as Coriolanus. Page was great, by the way -- certainly not a fake soldier, but someone whom you could imagine  both in the phalanx and at the head of an army. He let on that he enjoyed the highly focused warrior life, was apparently juiced by it -- not necessarily pleased, though, and certainly not happy. But early in the play, after he has done some balls-out crazy heroism, he asked his general to free a citizen whom the army has interned, because the man had done him some kindess. Coriolanus was asked the man's name -- in the script he responds with this: "By Jupiter! forgot./I am weary; yea, my memory is tired./Have we no wine here?"

The normal reading is that he is tired, and maybe, if you can work it in, that little people don't really matter to this mighty warrior after all. But Page had a half-minute freak-out; he stopped talking; his eyes went out of focus; he punched himself several times in the head, trying to remember. His comrades, half-embarrassed, hustled him off to get his wounds dressed.

My God, I thought; he has PTSD. And through the rest of the play I saw that as an explanation for a lot of what Coriolanus did. And it really worked as an explanation, too: His joylessness, restlessness, high discomfort with crowds and intimacy -- it fell into place. It sounds like something out of a classroom bull session, so maybe we needn't call it PTSD; maybe we can just say that the thing that gnawed Coriolanus seemed understandable, and had a relationship to something I'd seen in the world. In any case Page was playing it and making it work.

It did sap some life out of the famous final meeting between Coriolanus and Volumnia, not because D'Aquila fell down on the job -- she sure didn't -- but because her ability to pull Coriolanus out of his madness, which is frankly always a hard sell, had been somewhat explained away by his condition. Of course he was going to crack if she went on long enough. It didn't matter what she did. In fact, nothing other people did mattered much to him; he was on his course, not to take Rome, nor to gain revenge, but to die and put an end to his own suffering. Maybe that wasn't Shakespeare's idea, but it was something to see, and tragic.

UPDATE. In comments Derek makes some good counter-points, this among them:

I dunno. Assigning PTSD to Coriolanus seems to me as meaningful as assigning ADD or Manic Depression or Minor Depressive Episode (Recurring) to Hamlet. They're two archetypal characters in extreme situations, both of them animated more by Shakespeare's language and imagination than by ineluctable human decision.

I may have been unclear. Certainly if you use some clinical diagnosis, or even a homey character judgement -- like Hamlet as "the tragedy of a man who could not make up his mind") -- as an explanation for the play, or even a character within the play, you're being reductive and probably evading the hard work of analysis. But it's something else, I think, when the actor brings something that knocks over your preconceptions. Now, actors have to work hard to make these supermen comprehensible to audiences -- more than Shakespeare did, certainly -- and you can't tether them too much to convention; it could be that Page and/or his director, David Muse, were excited by this idea of Coriolanus and let it throw the play out of balance. Or maybe it was my old-fashioned idea of Coriolanus' and Volumnia's relationship that was out of balance. I don't know; maybe I'll have a better idea next time I see the play. But Page's conceit certainly woke me up.

Oh, and I haven't seen the Ralph Fiennes film of it but now I really want to, thanks for the recommendations.