The Litany of Abuse
Thinking about the many things I do at night, the prospect of seeing a play or two at the Stratford festival this year gets me excited. The excuse: my fiancée's Aunt from Trinidad is coming here for a month or so, and we think she'd appreciate, as a teacher, watching a performance of Coriolanus or Oliver the musical.I don't know how much I'll enjoy Colm Feore as Martius, or Coriolanus, in this year's performance. After reading, studying, and writing a paper on the character of Martius (Coriolanus) in last year's Advanced Shakespeare course, I always picture him as the presence of a towering, muscle-bound, aged general of wisdom exterior held by a cracked lynch-pin over a bloodthirsty and psychotic soldier interior - whose biting rhetorical venom pours out the true self-destructive, militant human passions. A tragic figure driven (in words first, and then action) by a vision of:
[...] the citizens of Rome as baleful, self-destructive fallen beings; living passively in a nightmare world driven exclusively by a passionate, fatalistic urge to devour the poisons of evil against all great and common sense. This is the diabolical or tragic vision of language in Shakespeare: human beings as fallen creatures, who, unable to overcome the evil of this world with language, give up on this god-given power in exchange for dominion over this fallen world.
What I hope are apt, Frygean words in an old essay used to explain as succintly as possible the passionate hair-pin drive behind one of Shakespeare's most jarring and disliked (anti-?) tragic heroes. I, for one, hope that Feore is able to inspire real phobos - terror, fear and aversion - in his audience with harsh, raspy, eviscerating delivery and a snarling, spiteful voice. That's what I felt reading words like these:
[...] the citizens of Rome as baleful, self-destructive fallen beings; living passively in a nightmare world driven exclusively by a passionate, fatalistic urge to devour the poisons of evil against all great and common sense. This is the diabolical or tragic vision of language in Shakespeare: human beings as fallen creatures, who, unable to overcome the evil of this world with language, give up on this god-given power in exchange for dominion over this fallen world.
What I hope are apt, Frygean words in an old essay used to explain as succintly as possible the passionate hair-pin drive behind one of Shakespeare's most jarring and disliked (anti-?) tragic heroes. I, for one, hope that Feore is able to inspire real phobos - terror, fear and aversion - in his audience with harsh, raspy, eviscerating delivery and a snarling, spiteful voice. That's what I felt reading words like these:
Who deserves greatness
deserves your hate, and your affections are
a sick man’s appetite, who desires most that
which would increase his evil. (1.1.164-167)
I'm still uncertain for one, looking at that photo - thinking Feore inspires a modest Canadian, not a bloody-curdling Elizabethan feeling of dread, like Stephen Harper in the face of the Media.
posted by Davyth | 3:10 AM
2 Comments:
I think Feore is actually very good casting for Corey's Old Anus. He has a strong presence that is seldom used well in films, mainly because his Hollywood assignments are supporting figures. But he has a powerful voice, and he can command attention convincingly. Still think he was the best thing about that dreadful Titus a few years ago.
Did you see Feore as Trudeau? Excellent performance.
Sounds promising. As long as Feore will make me loathe, despise, and pity Coriolanus by the end, I should be content. Of course the last time I attended Stratford I was a strapping high school nincompoop oohing and aahing after Paul Gross in Hamlet.
Post a Comment
<< Home