Hear ye, hear ye! ANU Shakespeare society is giving new life to Coriolanus

Posted on 16 August, 2022

The ANU Shakespeare society is a passionate student-led theatre group determined to shine the spotlight on the revered works of the literary genius.

Their latest production is reframing and reimagining the thematical layers of Coriolanus—a tragedy based on the life of the legendary Roman leader Caius Marcius Coriolanus. Through the lens of one of two co-directors, Madeleine Smith, this polarising narrative has been transformed with a profoundly relevant and deeply human reiteration taking centre stage.

Balancing work, university, and the odd COVID scare while putting together a production of this scale is no easy feat, but as Madeleine explains, the ANU Shakespeare Society is a space of collaboration, creativity, and unwavering love.

“It’s all student-led, completely run by students. So, the executive members of the Shakespeare Society are all students. I am currently directing, and I’m a student as well as my entire production team,” she explains.

“We’ve got costume designers, we have a tech designer doing lights and sound, and we’ve got a production designer running around looking after sets and props. Maybe they’re studying these kinds of things, but a lot of the time, it’s just passion”.

It’s a passion that has followed Madeleine for most of her life—and Coriolanus marks her directing debut, an unyielding narrative that she has always been drawn towards.

“Coriolanus is one that I’ve spent a lot of time with. I wrote a thesis on it a couple of years ago for university. And I’ve had a concept of what I would do with it if I were ever to direct the production of Coriolanus, so I’ve been thinking about this play in this concept for like three years”.

But it’s through her sharply observed directorial lens that alienating soliloquies have been reframed. Looking inward, Madeleine and the ANU Shakespeare Society are unfurling themes of masculinity, manhood, and identity that live within this largely misunderstood tale.

“It’s an unknown play of Shakespeare’s, and I think it’s because it’s not very hyper-specific. It’s a historical play that at first glance doesn’t seem like it’s entirely or even at all relevant to modern society”.

“It’s a story about a decorated Roman soldier who hates the common people, and when you read it at face value it just feels like a historical retelling of something that happened.”

“But looking closer, I realised that there are such incredibly complicated themes of this man who is very much caught being pulled in multiple and different directions, where his society has very stringent and self-enforcing expectations of what it means to be a man, and how the society values manhood”, explains Madeleine.

No longer living on the fringes of Shakespeare’s work, Coriolanus is speaking to a new generation. Ancient battles have been transformed into rugby games,  alongside formerly suppressed female characters who are resisting this “gracious silence” and are magnified on stage with liberal brushstrokes—luminescent and full of strength.

For Madeleine, this powerful reimagining came come to life effortlessly on stage.

“It wasn’t a particularly big leap to be thinking about these themes. When you start to think about our culture of athleticism and the way that we sort of glorify athleticism in Australia, everything just fell into place,” she explains.

“If we look up rugby news, there are rugby players embroiled in scandals of domestic violence but being protected by their peers. And then the way that those kinds of stories are then swept under the rug as soon as they achieved something great in their sport, and then thinking about the sort of crisis of invisibility when it comes to men’s mental health,”

It’s this disarming, timely perspective (and the talented team who have the drive to do it justice) that makes this production of Coriolanus such a trailblazing piece of local theatre.

“I hope to demonstrate that and prove something that we all already knew, which is that Shakespeare can be interesting and can say something that is that is pertinent and relevant to us today”.