Word: coriolanus
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...Despite much derision (the Sunday Times called the plans "bizarre ... the ending of a great era"), the scheme has found favor with actors who, among other things, disliked the dingy backstage conditions at the Barbican. Toby Stephens, a much-praised RSC Coriolanus in 1994, calls it a "timely cutting away of dead wood for a company that was overstretched." RSC managing director Chris Foy speaks enthusiastically of a break from his company?s "well-engineered but constricting operating model, a move away from the railway timetable concept." But whether the RSC finds a new direction, or has its identity chipped...
...more ambitious of the two - geographically at least - is the Almeida. Last year it produced Shakespeare's Richard II and Coriolanus starring Ralph Fiennes, not on its own stage but at the derelict Gainsborough Film Studios. Now, forced to leave their 300-seat Islington base while $6 million in renovations are carried out, Kent and McDiarmid have spent $1.2 million fixing up a long-closed bus station at King's Cross as an alternative home. The result is one of the most unusual and invigorating spaces in London...
...Coriolanus says, we "bring in the crows to peck the eagles." The crows of the media; the crows of correctness. There's something bracing about his exhilarating contempt. It's what we miss now: not mere radio ranting, but efficacious and inner-directed contempt...
...During a brief moment in Shakespeare's play when Coriolanus has agreed to flatter the masses, he promises, "I'll mountebank their loves." That brings up the subject of William Jefferson Clinton, who is America's outstanding mountebank of love. Much of his own crowd has now turned on Clinton and cast him down from the Tarpeian Rock. Hard to think of Clinton as Coriolanus, of course; the Roman was a man of fierce principle. Clinton is more like Sportin' Life. Our first black president, as Toni Morrison called him, has banished himself to 125th Street, there to condescend...
...imagines the exile will last long. You can prune Bill Clinton down to a stump and he rises every time from his own ruins. It's happened many times before, it's his motif - death and resurrection. He turns up like Tom Sawyer at his own funeral. "Coriolanus," being a tragedy, had to end in the protagonist's death. Clinton is incapable of tragedy. What he needs is a new project...