Coriolanus

'O mother, mother! What have you done?'

Failing harvests, fragile supply chains, food shortages, a spike in the cost of living; military insurgency and counter-insurgency locked in bloody stalemate; a political system on the brink of collapse, unable to respond to democratic demands, and unwilling to secure its citizens' basic material needs. This is Coriolanus: the last of Shakespeare's tragedies, and perhaps his timeliest. The action takes place in the early days of Rome, in a fragile republic surrounded by external enemies and riven with internal conflict. At its centre is the strong-willed, self-sabotaging figure of Caius Martius Coriolanus, who uses his military prowess to defend the city, but ends up bent on destroying it.

Based on events from Roman history, but glancing at contemporary popular discontent, Coriolanus is a highly sophisticated analysis of crisis: social, political, economic, ecological, and psychological. It stages the unpredictable struggle between Rome's ruling class and its people, testing out the prospects and limits of political action, and reflecting on the tragic inflections of politics itself. At the same time, it shows how those political antagonisms can erupt within other, seemingly separate areas of life: the domestic, the erotic, the familial, even the tightly clenched mind of its protagonist. In Coriolanus, Shakespeare offers his fullest examination of a mother-child dynamic, as its protagonist negotiates the demands and desires of his formidable mother Volumnia. And all these elements, psychic and social, come together in the play's astonishing climax, where the survival of the city hangs on the encounter between a mother and her son, holding hands, silent.

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