Coriolanus, Donmar Warehouse, review - Telegraph

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Tom Hiddleston’s Coriolanus is a lean, mean killing machine with crippled emotions in this exciting and intense production, says Charles Spencer

There is a good deal about Josie Rourke’s new production of Shakespeare’s Coriolanus, starring Tom Hiddleston, that I found irritating. It is full of modish tricks, including blasts of deafening electronic music, costumes that mix Roman robes and Dr Martens boots, and a people’s tribune played by an actress. This was, after all, the theatre that gave us an all-female Julius Caesar.

But these are merely the trappings of a production that is often exciting and intense, with Hiddleston delivering a powerhouse performance in the title role. He is one of the current crop of gifted Old Etonian actors, and that seems exactly right. For Coriolanus has always put me in mind of the classic English public schoolboy with an undeveloped heart, the bossy and often brutal head prefect who is brilliant on the games field and at telling the younger pupils to “take a brace”, as they used to say in my days at Charterhouse, but all at sea when it comes to emotion and an inner life.

The actor memorably captures both sides of Coriolanus’s personality. In the battle of the first act we see him in all his gory glory, drenched in blood and winning the fight single-handed. In Hiddleston’s performance he’s a lean, mean killing machine, and there is an extraordinary moment in which he takes a shower after the battle and gasps with pain as his wounds turn the water blood red.

But in almost every other respect, Coriolanus is inadequate, an emotional cripple in thrall to his domineering mother, and a crashing snob who can’t bear sucking up to the plebs to get their vote. Here, too, Hiddleston is persuasive, and Rourke’s production excitingly captures the play’s political process as Coriolanus goes from hero to zero, thanks to the pride of his own personality and the machinations of the tribunes who, unlike the awkward hero, know exactly how to bend the mob to their devious will.

But this harsh, flinty tragedy becomes suddenly moving in the last act as Coriolanus’s mother, wife (Borgen’s Birgitte Hjort Sørensen) and son try to persuade him not to take revenge on the Rome that has banished him. Here, Hiddleston marvellously captures a sudden piercing tenderness and love, as if experiencing these overwhelming emotions for the first time. The cruel irony is that he also knows that in following the unfamiliar demands of his heart he is signing his own death warrant.

At every stage of his tragic journey, Hiddleston is compelling and persuasive, and there is fine support, especially from Deborah Findlay as the vicious old boot of a mother who has made him the man he is; Mark Gatiss as the wily, patrician, Menenius; and Elliot Levey and Helen Schlesinger as the manipulative tribunes of the people.

As Aufidius, the Volscian general who becomes Coriolanus’s nemesis, Hadley Fraser rather overplays the hearty northern accent and his character’s homoerotic feelings for his adversary.

But though this is a flawed production, there is no mistaking its dramatic energy, while the mixture of charisma and emotional truth in Hiddleston’s performance is very special indeed.