Weird play, Coriolanus. It’s like a playground fight that spills out into the street and has to be resolved by someone’s mum. The hero is a Roman general whose enemies conspire to banish him so he takes revenge by joining forces with a foreign power and laying siege to Rome.
Coriolanus’s mother shows up on the battlefield and begs him to drop his vendetta and come back home. Later he dies but without delivering a big speech.
The Roman soldiers have plastic swords that go ‘clack’ rather than metal ones that go ‘ching’
The key difficulty is that Coriolanus’s tragic flaw, a lack of ambition, is really a virtue. He’s far too noble for his own good and his disdain for power makes him annoying rather than admirable. He’s a high-minded windbag, a gabbling fence-sitter, a verbose but overcautious dud.
He may be indomitably brave in battle but he’s also unstoppably prolix in debate. This makes him lifeless and uninspiring. Watching his story is like riding a bike with a broken chain. The pedals are spinning but you’re moving nowhere.
David Oyelowo has the misfortune to play the prattling duffer and he does the job well enough. Wonderful diction, a powerful stage presence and a proper sense of gravitas. He’s at his best in the battle scenes but the NT’s armourer has supplied the Roman soldiers with plastic swords that go ‘clack’ rather than metal ones that go ‘ching.’
The poster shows Oyelowo stripped to the waist like a porn star which suggests a certain anxiety about ticket sales. Rightly so. If you feel you ought to see Coriolanus – perhaps you haven’t ticked that box yet – you’ll find this an acceptable option. You can doze through the boring bits and just enjoy the scenery.
Es Devlin’s designs are stunning to look at. The action takes place in a modern museum filled with marble busts and sculptures that remind us of the vast chronological gulf that separates us from antiquity. The playing area is varied by adaptable grey walls that create a series of homely rooms and chic public spaces.
The colour scheme, all muted purples and saffrons, generates an atmosphere of grandeur and subtle opulence. The only blunder is the battle scene where Coriolanus’s mother and his wife arrive in black robes surmounted by enormous headdresses made from dustbin lids or motorbike handlebars. The performers look like extras from a KLF video. That aside, the visuals are faultless. Worthy of awards.
A documentary play, Ostan plunges us into the stinking, grubby, noisy, shallow world of a south London carwash. As a sensory experience the show is openly and deliberately loathsome. Nasty, half-witted characters rush on and off the stage, cursing, gossiping and yakking over their telephones or playing video games.
It’s hard to follow what’s going on because several shouted conversations overlap and intermingle, creating a swirl of nonsense. And the storyline is amateurishly written. The plot barely develops for 90 minutes and then everything happens at once. A dead body is found, an undercover cop is revealed and an asylum seeker receives a reply from the Home Office. Then it’s over. But none of the action matters because the characters are so lacking in sympathy or interest.
Everyone on stage is an aggressive cry-baby or a wannabe gangster. And all they can do is talk on the phone or sponge down car windscreens. They have no curiosity or imagination and no practical skills whatsoever. And they seem unaware that racism is frowned upon in Britain. Gorkem, a young Kurd, reacts furiously when he hears Arabic spoken. He screams like a toddler and spits on the floor. ‘No Arabic!’ His co-workers suggest that his ancestors may be Iranian or Turkish and he has another hissy-fit. ‘No Arabic, no Turkish, no Iranian,’ he bawls.
Shapur, a businessman who fancies himself as a people-trafficker, boasts about torturing the ‘mongrels’ who steal from him. ‘I cut their dirty Kurdish hands off,’ he says. You’ll hear plenty more racist curses uttered in Farsi and Kurmanji (all translated in the playscript) but you’ll need to be a language expert to keep up. The script by Arzhang Pezhman offers a dispiriting snapshot of London’s underworld and it feels thoroughly authentic.
The characters spend their days plotting crimes, denouncing their neighbours and hassling the Home Office for residency papers. The myth of the entrepreneurial whizz-kid who enriches Britain with his verve and brilliance is a fantasy according to the evidence presented here. These globe-trotting misfits have nothing to offer and nothing to look forward to. They fled brutality in the Middle East and arrived in Europe only to find the same gangster culture already embedded. They hoped to escape barbarity and merely imported it. Tragic, really. If the supporters of illegal migration were to see this play they might change their minds. More likely, they’d try to close it down.
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