FROM THE ARCHIVES:A lukewarm response by critics to the Abbey's production of Shakespeare's Coriolanus in 1936 prompted this blistering riposte from Seán Ó Faoláin. But it failed to save the play, which was taken of after six performances.
- JOE JOYCE
Sir, – Dublin theatrical critics give me a pain in the neck. I read with disgust the watery approval of the Abbey production of “Coriolanus” last night, and thought of a friend’s comment that all you need nowadays to be a critic is enough cheek to put your tongue in.
Here is a fine, dashing, swift presentation of one of the weakest of Shakespeare’s plays, flung colourfully, and with a vigorous zest on the stage by a producer [Hugh Hunt] and an actor who know that it is not a play to be sipped, but something to be thrown, as its author threw it, in the face of the public like a gauntlet. And one critic protests that Mr. Jarman might have acted Coriolanus better if he took it as Mr. [Barry] Fitzgerald took Menenius, “a somewhat similar character” (he says) “in a minor key.”
Did anyone every hear such a dribble of bogwater? Menenius was an old man with a shrewd, practised sense of politics, and a happy vein of humour. He could talk to the rabble on their own terms (e.g., the parable of the body and its members), even to the tribunes he could talk with salt on his tongue and keep on terms with them.
His “son” had not as much as a grain of humour, and it is one of the points of the play that these two characters are deliberately contrasted by Shakespeare, and the contrast was properly emphasised by the producer on Monday night.
The critics seem to think that Mr. Jarman’s Coriolanus was too vigorous. But what other way, in Heaven’s name, would they have had him act this stupid, mulish, “too absolute,” uncontrolled, egotistical man?
“He could not carry his honours even,” Aufidius said of him, in a speech cut on Monday night (and perhaps rightly cut as being undramatic?) The character is static – I swear the word is in every text-book of the play – and impresses us only by its extremes. Physically, in voice and stature, Mr. Jarman made an ideal Coriolanus.
He towered properly over everyone about him on the stage. He tore through them, embarrassing his senatorial friends as much as he made his enemies not merely fear him, but hate him. He showed us the violent man who, had he come to power, might have been a tyrannical dictator, and by his uncontrolled fury he annotated as much the dangers of privileges as the weakness of the “many-headed” and timorous mob. It was a fine performance, and a critic who could not see it as such did not deserve to see it at all.
We can forgive a lack of discrimination in our critics – how kind they can be, for example, to our spews of farces! – but a lack of enthusiasm before a splendid bit of work is unforgiveable. But this is an ungenerous city! – Yours, etc.,
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