It's two years, almost to the day, since Mike Pearson and Mike Brookes brought Aeschylus to the Brecon Beacons. Now they've pulled off another tremendous feat for the roving National Theatre of Wales. They have brought together Shakespeare's Coriolanus with Bertolt Brecht's unfinished version of the play and set it in the present day: so, no comic plebs and a canny eye on celebrity worship. They've used for their stage a 1930s RAF aircraft hangar – a cathedral dedicated to flight and fight – on the outskirts of Cardiff. They have produced an unforgettable political and personal drama: rich, tough and resonant.
The experience they offer is of being seized, overwhelmed and yet intimately spoken to. The audience is adrift (this is a promenade performance) in a lofty, clamorous space, yet enclosed in a bubble of sound: you hear the speeches through headphones. Characters loom out of the crowd, at first indistinguishable from audience members; vans race around; in trailers on the periphery the actors not officially onstage become spectators, waiting for news and scanning the events, quietly intense. The action whirls through the building (divided only by one low wall of breezeblocks), sometimes wrongfooting an audience who may be looking elsewhere and don't always know where the speakers, who are talking so urgently in the ears, actually are. Sometimes – a point about news coverage is made lightly but decisively – it's easier to watch an event on the enormous video screens that dominate the back wall than to see the live event: things, after all, are clearer when confusion has been cropped.
The full review is available on The Guardian website here |
