The Donmar Coriolanus with Tom Hiddleston in the title role was put up on Youtube. I liked it, with the caveat that I preferred Ralph Fiennes' interpretation - both in the title role and as a production, though the later is a bit unfair since it's a movie, not a stage production, and thus of course can do more in terms of cinematography. Where I think Fiennes as the advantage: Fiennes' Coriolanus really does come across as one of those military types unable to function in civilian society, and thus unable to even go through the motions of campaigning. Hiddleston, despite declaiming all the lines about pride with conviction, still comes across as too sociable for me to believe he couldn't pretend even for five minutes. Also, the Fiennes Coriolanus had Coriolanus and Aufidius mutually obsessed with each other not just in words but by acting, and thus was way slashier, imo as always, while the Dommar Coriolanus had me believe the Aufidius was hung up on good old Gaius Martius, but not vice versa, at least not to the same degree.

What I liked about the Domnar in particular: our scheming duo of Tribunes, who were instantly recognizable politicians, and good for you, production, of making one female. The gratitious shower scene, providing us with the chance to see how hard Tom Hiddleston trained to be cast as an action hero. And, to be fair, the facial acting in the big Volumnia and Coriolanus confrontation where you see just when he makes his decision, knowing it will kill him.

Both productions - both Coriolani? - tried to get around the fact that Virgilia, Coriolanus' wife, has hardly any lines and is completely overshadowed by Volumnia his mother by providing her with a lot of silent reactions to what's going on and with silent interactions with her husband emphasizing physical tenderness between them. (I do suspect this is also done to banish Freudian interpretations of Coriolanus and his mother.) This is most effective in the early scene where Volumnia upon hearing the reports of her son's battle bravery wishes he had even more wounds to distinguish himself, and Virgilia, who is played by Katrine from Borgen, is silently horrified. Now Volumnia, otoh, is a fantastic female Shakespearean role. Not sympathetic, but, like Queen Margaret in the York tetralogy, a gift for an actress. In the Domnar production, I felt they tried to soften her in her big scene, where you don't get the impression she realises that by saving her city, she's also dooming her son, and that her accusations earlier came out of desperation and love. Otoh Vanessa Redgrave in the Fiennes movie played a Volumnia who does realise but does it anyway, and also means every word, and she has that inner hardness. Both make for very affecting scenes, just in different ways.


On to the other Coriolanus, i.e. Snow. The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes is the Hunger Games prequel published this month, featuring seventeen to eighteen years old Coriolanus Snow, the tenth Hunger Games and a lot of song lyrics: Portrait of the Dictator as a young Sociopath, essentially. Even more than an origin story for Snow, it's an origin story of the Hunger Games as they show up in the trilogy, and that to me was the most interesting part, along with the fact that the novel - which does remain in young Coriolanus' pov, but not in first person, as with the Katniss novels, but in third person - fleshes out the Capitol. Collins is good with the post war society feel; just barely papered over ruins, everyone still very much affected by the war. (Including our villain protagonist, and not just because his family went from rich to genteel poverty - poverty by Capitol standards, which is still laughably privileged when compared with the Districts - but because he grew up with bombings as part of his every day life.) The Games themselves aren't yet the successful high tech media spectacle they'll become, but a post war revenge act that's starting to become routine and which (some) of the Capitol kids are still capable to be appalled by. The arena is truly an old sports arena (with bomb damage), in which the tributes are locked with some weapons in order to kill themselves with. There are no rewards for the "victor". There are few cameras and mikes, but they don't cover the entire arena, and are static. The tributes themselves aren't fetishized and fed before hand but literally locked into cages of the zoo. The interviews, costumes, sponsors and betting system, the mixture of privilege and gilded slavery the victors later life in, in short, the way the Games become a gigantic commercial sports event allowing the audience to "participate" and feel great about themselves by simultanously rooting for "their" tribute of choice and being entirely unbothered by the fact this is a bunch of children forced to slaughter themselves - all this will be invented and added during the course of the story, and I'll give you three guesses as to who does most of the inventing. (As with the original books, there's also some neat media satire and history going on; when it's possible for the first time to bet on a tribute, it's still possible to place your bet in the post office as well as via phone calls, for example.)

In terms of young Coriolanus, I'm not so sure the story works if its aim is to answer as to where human evil comes from, but then I'm not sure that it is. Early on, he's self-centered, a great many of the actions the characters around him interpret as good or compassionate are really caused by him working for his own advantage, but otoh he's not an evil clockwork; he has nightmares, shakes, can be horrified when witnessing sadism on display and believes himself to be attached to several people. By the end of the story, he's set on the course of becoming President Snow with no regrets whatsoever and not a flicker of empathy in sight, and he got there through his own choices. However, even if you didn't already known he'll be the main antagonist of the Hunger Games, I don't think the narrative ever gave me the sense that this particular character would make other choices, so if this is supposed to be a question of nature versus nurture, it's definitely settling on the nature side. I'm just not sure that this was one narrative goal.

We get several characters who are in the same or extremely similar situations Coriolanus is in, and who make different choices. Unlike the Capitol kids Haymitch observes decades later in the movie version, here some of the Capitol teenagers are able to see not just the wrongness in the fate of one particular tribute but of the entire system, and act on it. Incidentally, that we see Capitol society - and later the Peacekeepers in training - not as homogenous but as individuals with differing opinions and ethics is definitely one of the advantages of choosing a a third person Snow pov, as opposed to making this novel's main tribute character the pov.

Trivia: Collins really does like her songs. The novel provides us with the origin for both Katniss' Meadow song and The Hanging Tree, adding a thick layer of irony to the way it'll be later used in Mockingbird, and there are other songs, including a national anthem for Panem. Collins also seems to subscribe to the believe that loving music by itself signals something about human sensitivity and capacity for empathy - young Coriolanus goes from neutral and very occasionally respective on music to actively resenting it through the course of the story, which is one of the marker as to his degree from neutral (neither good nor bad) to evil in his development. Between Hitler's passion for not just Wagner but Franz Lehar and Stalin's love for Mozart (and other composers, and live recordings; see also, the Death of Stalin opening sequence which uses a event), Louis XIV liking ballet so much he performed in it and good old Frederick the Great playing and composing flute music, I really really REALLY doubt that being a despot and loving music is in any way incompatible. But in The Hunger Games verse music and singing has strict positive connections, so that fits within this world.

No Hollow Crown anymore, and thus I get my Shakespeare kicks from Ralf Fiennes' film version of Corialanus, which I hadn't seen before. He directs as well as stars in the title role, and the supporting cast is fantasic - Vanessa Redgrave as his mother Volumnia, Brian Cox as the wily and affable politician Menenius, James Nesbitt as a demagogic tribune, Jessica Chastain as Coriolanus' wife Virgilia and Gerald Butler, being not bad, not bad at all (and who'd thought it after his Phantom) as the arch nemisis Tullus Aufidius. The film, like the Ian McKellen/Richard Loncraine Richard III and the Baz Luhrmann Romeo and Juliet, adapts the play for the present, ruthlessly slashes, edits and changes pace. It was shot in Serbia, around Belgrad, so the fictional Rome is basically a Balkan country of today.

Now Corialanus, the play, is a tough nut to crack. It's the anti-identification play out of which no one, with the possible exception of Menenius, comes out looking well. Gaius Martius (he gets the honorofic "Coriolanus" mid play) is a soldier barely able to function in civilian life, with nothing but contempt for the people and both unable and unwilling to play the political game of disguising it and to shmooze, which is how he gets himself banished. The people in turn are presented as easily stirred up this way or that way (not news if you know Shakespeare's Julius Caesar), the tribunes are egotastic demagogues, Menenius means well, but has the really dumb idea of getting Gaius Martius into politics to begin with, and Volumnia, who in her fierceness is one of the best Shakespeare roles for women, is very much where Gaius Martius Coriolanus got his contempt for the people and stiff necked pride from. Tullus Aufidius, his best enemy, both admires and resents him but in the end is willing to scheme where Corialanus is not. It's like a Robert Altman movie. Only faster paced in this version. Fiennes as a director has a real visual flair, and he is great at coaxing excellent performances out of his fellow actors. Having seen Brian Cox mainly in villain roles before, it was great to see him as wily yet virtuous for a change. Vanessa Redgrave is stunning as Volumnia, who is basically Angela Petrelli without a sense of humour but with the same sharp tongue, iron-clad ambiton, willingness to sacrifice her child/children if needs be yet loving them all the same. Since this version is contemporary, Volumnia is transformed into an old soldier and career military herself (at official functions, she's still in uniform), and we get the kind of scenes with her and Gaius Martius mostly reserved for father and sons on American tv and filmdom.

As for Ralf Fiennes' own performance, if actors like Tom Hiddleston and Sebastian Stan are the masters of the teary eyed rebellious stare, Fiennes is the master of the demonic stare; it's fiercely physical performance, with Gaius Martius in battle transforming himself into something mythic and barely human, yet clumsy and ill at ease as soon as you put him in an every day context, though no less glaring. In his big scene with Volumnia, when his big revenge scheme clashes with his mother's demand, the moment when he realises he can't continue the war and will give in to her (and that this simultanously condemns him to death) is an amazing shattering and melting of all that self forged rage embodiment into something nakedly human (and when he then cries, it's devastating because of how he was before).

As a director, Fiennes is amazingly blatant with the homoerotic dimension of war. Not just in terms of, say, canon as phallic symbols and the soldiers, with their shaved heads, transforming themselves into those as well but via the entire relationship between Coriolanus and Aufidius. The two are obsessed with each other, the first time they meet mid-battle (not the first time they meet at all, we're informed this is just the culmination of a long feud, just the first ime in the film), their hand-to-hand combat isn't just violent but also soon indistiguishable from sex, and this is echoed at the end when Aufidius finally (after some of his soldiers already had a go at his command, just as they earlier emulated and forged themselves into the image of Coriolanus) does kill Corialanus, in a tight embrance and via a knife, tenderly cradling his head during and after. The desire to kill and desire are hopelessly entertwined and yet another symptom of how and why Coriolanus as well as Aufidius and his soldiers are unable to fit into civilian life anymore. Early in the play Gaius Martius calls himself a sword made for Rome to use, and that is all he can be (either for or against Rome). Which is his tragedy.