Here/There: National Theatre Wales’s Coriolan/us, 8–18 August 2012, Hangar 858, RAF St Athan, Vale of Glamorgan (directed by Mike Pearson and Mike Brookes)¹

Abstract

This article considers the Mike Pearson and Mike Brookes National Theatre Wales co-production of Shakespeare’s Coriolan/us, performed in Hangar 858 at RAF St. Athan in the Vale of Glamorgan in August 2012. It unpacks the concepts of ‘here’ and ‘there’ as they were embodied within the performance itself and the location in the broader context of the Cultural Olympiad. We reflect on the fact that the ‘here’ of this production was far from either London or Stratford, more typically places of Shakespearean performance.

Notes

2. Information from ‘MoD St Athan: Era Ends as Last VC10 Aircraft Leaves Maintenance Base’, BBC News, 23 February 2012, <http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-wales-south-east-wales-17113947> [accessed 10 December 2012].

3. All quotations from Brookes and Pearson are taken from the performance programme.

4. The World Shakespeare Festival encompassed more than sixty different productions. A few of the ones seen in London and/or Stratford travelled to Newcastle, Brighton, or the Edinburgh Festival, and one production was seen only in Birmingham. The National Theatre Wales’s Coriolan/us was the only show to appear outside a major city and one of only three that did not include either London or Stratford performances. See ‘World Shakespeare Festival 2012’, Royal Shakespeare Company, <http://www.rsc.org.uk/about-us/history/world-shakespeare-festival-2012/venues-and-productions/> [accessed 9 July 2013] for more details.

5. In an article published in the Guardian as pre-publicity for Coriolan/us, Andrew Dickson suggests that each performance will have an audience of ‘350 or so’. Andrew Dickson, ‘National Theatre Wales’s Coriolan/us: Ready for Take Off’, Guardian, 30 July 2012, <http://www.guardian.co.uk/stage/2012/jul/30/coriolanus-pearson-brooks-interview> [accessed 13 December 2012].

6. The reviewer of this article for CTR suggested that the vehicles had arrived at a much more controlled pace; we saw the show on its final night and whether it was the cumulation of experience or celebration of the occasion, the drivers were confidently speeding, even on the tight turns required by the hangar!

7. Peter Holland provides an extensive account of riots and other protests in 1607 triggered by food shortages which he persuasively argues informed both Shakespeare’s writing of Coriolanus and the reception of the play in London (1608). See his ‘Introduction’ to the Arden edition of Shakespeare’s Coriolanus, 3rd edn (London: Bloomsbury, 2013), pp. 56–68.

8. See the British Film Institute’s listing for more information about the documentary, Benefit of the Doubt, dir. by Peter Whitehead (Lorrimer Films, 1967), <http://www.screenonline.org.uk/film/id/1379869/index.html> [accessed 17 May 2013]. There Stuart Heaney notes that ‘Vietnam was regarded as the world’s first “television war”’.

9. Benjamin Talbott, Trystan Hardy, Victoria Ashfield, Thomas Williams, and Odilon Marcenaro.

10. Jennifer Low, ‘“Bodied Forth”: Spectator, Stage and Actor in the Early Modern Theater’, Comparative Drama, 39 (Spring 2005), 1–29 (pp. 18–19).

11. On the company’s website: ‘About’, National Theatre Wales, <nationaltheatrewales.org/about#aboutnationaltheatrewales> [accessed 13 December 2012].

12. This was printed in a National Theatre Wales ‘newspaper’ distributed at the event as well as on a cotton bag that contained the Coriolan/us programme.