Each performance of Shakespeare’s Coriolanus, currently at the Donmar, begins with staff shooing away a heaving returns queue. The crowd’s demographic is evenly split, between white-haired punters who make up the bulk of most matinee audiences, and swarms of teenage girls. The reason for this is Tom Hiddleston, who plays Coriolanus and has previously starred in Thor and The Avengers. Hiddleston gives a stellar performance and his cut-glass abdominals are fully capitalised on by the play’s direction. His torso is showcased in all its blood-stained, sweaty glory in a gratuitous ‘wound-washing’ scene which elicited gasps from the junior half of the audience and prompted my grandfather to comment in the interval that Hiddleston was ‘quite a dish’.
This sexing up of Shakespeare by playing on an existing TV or film fanbase is not unprecedented and and has arguably brought Coriolanus to a younger audience. However, it is interesting to see how such sexing up works differently for women. The decision to cast Birgitte Hjort Sørensen (Katrine in Danish TV series Borgen) as Coriolanus’ wife was probably based on the fact that she has a broad and loyal UK fanbase. Hjort Sørensen’s talent did not survive the transition to stage and her British accent, though good, is not perfect. Her part – one of Shakespeare’s most wooden – entails kissing her husband and crying when he is away at war. As with Hiddleston, the costume department capitalised on her looks, but while Coriolanus’ bare-chested virility was both well-pitched and impressive to a modern audience, his wife was left to totter around in badly fitting four-inch shoeboots and a laser-cut bodycon dress.
While Coriolanus was the picture of masculinity, his wife’s sexy get-up was incongruous and made me suspend my disbelief. Coriolanus was written 500 years ago and it is depressing that the gender roles filled by its characters don’t need to be updated for a modern audience or a modern wardrobe.
