Coriolanus is a tragedy in the Roman plays of Shakespeare.  It is about an actual Roman figure described by Plutarch from the early days of the Republic. 

Rome is engaged in wars with neighbouring tribes.  It is sharply divided between patricians and plebs.  The former have the Senate.  The latter have the Tribunes.  They resemble our ACTU leaders.  The governors on watch are the Consuls.  To become one, you had to be a great soldier.  But you also had to be a politician. 

The tragedy is that the hero was a great soldier, but a lousy politician.  He held workers in contempt and he could not hide it.  He also did not want to play the games politicians play – networking the voters, surviving garden parties, or showing off his war wounds.  Negotiation was not in his vocabulary.

The dramatic interest is how much his mother made him this way, or can now change or direct him, and how he can avoid being brought low by the tribunes.

A 2017 RSC production at Stratford on Opus Arte has all the loud balletic bells and whistles of Broadway extravaganzas we expect now for the locals and tourists.   (‘Is this a play I see before me?’)  They are in modern costumes – dress uniforms and dinner suits – except for fight scenes, when they become blood crazed Tarzans in working gear using ancient Roman swords. 

All the players are white – except one.  The hero is black and with an accent to match. 

This is impossible.  We await with interest the arrival of the mother and wife.  White – Rinso white.  Like a pair out of Noel Coward in the West End circa 1948.  I pass over in silence the colour of the child.  By now, those of my upbringing feel like we are at a MAGA rally – you check your brains in at the door.

This playwright feared the mob.  The tribunes here ruthlessly manipulate the masses – with all the skill and devotion shown centuries later by Mark Antony.  They are played by women (one of whom looks just like Helen Garner).  Their drab apparatchik attire, black and gray, might shorten guessing games about their sexuality.

Well, all that is impossible too.  The Keystone Cops and Marx Bros reach their peak when the hero shows his wounds.  He gets sent out in a white dressing gown like those worn by boxers.  (And he wipes his hand on that gown after shaking the hand of one of the unwashed.)  Fortunately, the death sentence is not executed – it involved being thrown off the Tarpeian Rock as a celebration of Roman civilisation.  You would look a bit of a dill doing a header in a dinner suit and black tie.

In the name of Heaven – I am left lamenting the times I heard Richard Burton oozing contempt for the rabble.  Or the wonderful BBC production in full chiaroscuro where the tribunes are as threatening as they are pervasive, and look like they have come straight from the Inquisition to 1984, and Alan Howard erupts with loathing and amazement when a tribune drops the imperative ‘shall’.  As I said elsewhere:

If you want the Full Monty of haughty arrogance and distilled hate, there is Richard Burton on audiotape.  But the performance of Alan Howard for the BBC is just electrifying– as gripping as any performance for this author on the small screen.  He is manic, and most manic – and most frightening– when he smiles – which is not often.  He is both magisterial and brittle.  Some scenes stay with you. When canvassing the common people, he looks like an Eton and Oxford surgeon peddling incision photos at a flea market, or a nine-year-old behind the shelter shed – ‘I’ll show you mine if you show me yours.’  He erupts astoundingly when a tribune says ‘shall’ – a plebeian being imperative to a noble! (3.1.87)  And of course Aufidius knows what the word ‘boy’ will do.  (Imagine the current US President [Obama] being so addressed.)  Howard has ample back-up.  All the political scenes are very powerful.  The mood is not Vermeer or even Rembrandt, but Caravaggio.  The tribunes are like union organizers – Jesuitical and communist, depending on your phobia or fancy.  The film reeks of 1789.  ‘What is the city but the people?’  ‘The people are the city.’ (3.1.198-9).  Pure Robespierre.  As ever, Menenius is a crushing bore.

As it happens, the experienced actor playing Menenius here is one who can play his part – I would not say that of the lead.  He is not up to it.  (And spare a thought for the guy playing Cominius – God has so arranged it that the poor fellow bears a real resemblance to a son of Donald Trump.)

As I recall, some time ago some people had concerns about white men playing Othello.  It is perverse to go from a perceived insult to an actual inanity.  Spike Milligan would have been upstaged.  What we get in this show is a black man treating two white women with contempt – because they are lower caste.  In a play set in Rome two and a half millennia ago.

Why stop there?  Why not have a Chinese girl as King Lear, an Irish nun as Macbeth, and a blind, gay dwarf as Hamlet? 

Do these people think that we pay to go to the theatre to confront their mission to save the world – rather than revel in the miraculous genius of the greatest playwright the world has known? 

If I may borrow a phrase of Shelley, they are like gnats straining at a camel.

OK, this is the lamentation of a spent old Oz fogey, who lives in fear of the Tik Tok crowd, who can change their sex and sexuality at the drop of a hat – but I am not alone in feeling like I have been slapped in the face by some uppity ideologues driven by some misbegotten political dogma, who are bereft of both judgment and taste, and who have abused a trust that extends beyond their locale and our time. 

And even the team at Tik Tok may draw the line at changing the bloody colour of their skins.