'Coriolanus': Gods and Generals

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PLASTIC CONTAINERS filled with what looks like gloppy raspberry jam lurk backstage at the Kennedy Center’s Eisenhower Theater just before a recent performance of Shakespeare’s "Coriolanus." This stage blood gets star billing in the Royal Shakespeare Company’s vibrant staging of the Bard’s last-known tragedy. The tale of a Roman war hero undone by politics and arrogance unleashes such a torrent of gore and action, it’s shocking Quentin Tarantino hasn’t optioned it.

"It's one of Shakespeare’s most violent plays," says assistant director Christopher Rolls. "There’s so much war and bloodshed in it, partially because it’s about this man’s psyche. Shakespeare doesn’t just tell you that Coriolanus is a great fighter — he has the guts to show you."

The play’s action — and this proud patrician’s downfall — turns on two very different fights.

The one that uses the most of that stage goo is between Coriolanus’ Romans and their enemies du jour, the Volscians. In a scene of starkly creepy carnage, Coriolanus (William Houston) breaks through the impossibly high walls of the Volscian city. Then, after much clanging of swords and the scraping of what must be bones, he emerges with red liquid in his hair and the gleam of victory in his eyes.

This triumph leads Rome’s patricians to nominate Coriolanus for consulship. But the big C, while a battle star, isn't big on conciliatory gestures. He refuses to show the plebeians his war wounds and make nice, infuriating the scythe- and bread-paddle-wielding mob. They force the conquering hero to hightail it out of town.

"Shakespeare's very explicit that these citizens enter armed" says Rolls. "But it’s clear that they've got the tools of their trade."

While kitchen and barnyard implements don’t prove the undoing of the frankly hard-to-relate-to hero, his inability to sympathize with the everyday Joes who use them does. He joins up with the Volscians, deciding that if Rome won't love him, he’ll crush it — and his adoring mother, wife and kid, too.

But as any student of the Bard or history knows, former enemies make crummy bedfellows. While head Volscian Tullus Aufidius (Trevor White) initially welcomes Coriolanus, eventually he finds the Roman too proud and willful. Yeah, another raid on the show’s faux blood supply ends the show — but not before a hefty helping of political maneuvering and a rip-roaring, toga-on-toga fight.

"Shakespeare really wrote this with the sensibility of a brilliant film," says Rolls. "Someone must be sitting somewhere with a script of this for Brad Pitt."

» Kennedy Center, 2700 F St. NW; through May 6, $25-$78; 202-467-4600. (Foggy Bottom-GWU)

Photos by Stewart Hemley