A bottle of wine, a comforting hug, a shy kiss which led to more: Rob might have made a mistake. He’s not sure. He and his best friend had sex last night. They’ve known each other for years, went to school together and played together. But she left for work early this morning and Rob hasn’t been able to concentrate all day. Eager to talk to her about the previous evening, he’s bought a bottle of wine – another one – and is waiting on Stacy’s doorstep for her to come home.  But it’s Stacy’s flatmate Shona who arrives first and as they wait, things start to fall apart.

One man, a chair and a projector are all that PlayON Theatre’s production of Stacy uses to embellish Jack Thorne’s play, currently showing at the Pleasance Islington. All focus is on Rob, played by the slightly nervous but engaging Nic McQuillan. Rob is a conundrum of a character and the more he reveals of his life, the more opaque it becomes. Was he actually the favourite child, apple of his parents’ eye, the one people stopped on the street to say how beautiful he was? How did he end up in his dead-end, dead-boring call centre job? What is the significance of the dead dog in the street? What does ‘best friend’ Stacy really think of him? And for every part of the tale, do we believe him – or are we just being dragged into an unreliable narrator’s version of reality, into the confessions of an unjustified sinner?

Jack Thorne’s credits include TV (working on Channel 4’s Skins and Shameless, and alongside Shame Meadows on This is England ’86 and ’88) and radio (he won a Gold Sony Radio Academy Award in 2010 for his Radio 3 play People Snogging in Public Places) as well as theatre. With such a pedigree – and as a fan of This Is England – I was pleased to see Thorne’s history of hard-hitting writing continued in Stacy, which does not shy away from the awkward or make compromises to shield an audience from discomfort (here’s the disclaimer: if you’re squeamish about hearing tales of bodily fluids, and/or shy about images of granny sex and male genitalia then prepare for fingers-in-ears and eyes-on-floor moments) but it is in this uncompromising honesty that the piece finds much of its humour. We are drawn in, side by side with Rob as he expresses his confusion about Stacy and his uncertainty about women and relationships. The complicity built up between audience and performer, dealing with transgression in matters sexual, is reminiscent of Tim Crouch’s 2009 play The Author in which there was the same, slightly shifty ‘Does he know he’s saying that out loud?’ feeling created by Thorne.

Only an hour in total, Stacy would benefit from a slightly quicker and more even pace to keep up the narrative edge and, as McQuillan dives offstage almost without warning, the ending lacked quite the punch I expected, leaving an abrupt up-in-the-air feeling to the piece as a whole. Despite that, though, Stacy is a well-worth-it monologue of a boy lost, a love story gone awry, a 60-minute tale of neurosis and almost-adulthood, and a confession from a young man who has no idea how he ended up here.

Stacey is playing at the Pleasance Theatre until 29 January. For more information and tickets, see the Pleasance Theatre website.

Unfortunately, the reality of the situation is so dramatic and tragic, and Milk himself had such an eloquent turn of phrase, that Mann’s attempt to dramatise it fall rather flat. The extended court-room scene is leaden and drags, making the play feel longer than its hour and 40 minutes. Further, the court-room testimony, which draws heavily on verbatim text, is intercut with witness reports, character reports and  remembrances from those who knew the murdered men, making the whole piece feel disjointed. This is compounded by the staging (James Turner): the minimal court setting sits in between two banks of seating. This has the effect of half-heartedly putting the audience in the position of the jurors, but also means that the action – such as it is – takes place on a long, thin strip of stage, making me feel as though I was watching a slightly tedious tennis match.

Director Joss Bennathan also intercuts the piece with video footage, both of Milk himself and of the riots. The most powerful image in the whole piece is footage of the candle-lit march and vigil that was held, peacefully, immediately after Milk and Moscone were shot and killed. Unfortunately for Mann and Bennathan, this image is so striking that the remaining 20 or so minutes of the play feel superfluous.

Christopher Lane as the lawyer for the defence is superb, weaselling his way to a verdict of voluntary manslaughter instead of pre-mediated murder, but the script does not allow us to understand much of his motivation, nor does it allow him much depth. He does a remarkable job of making himself both hateful and understandable, but is not a well-rounded character. Philip Duguid-McQuillan also does a fine job of playing Dan White – a manic-depressive who had a momentary breakdown, or a bitter homophobe carrying out a politically motivated assassination? It’s not left ambiguous that a miscarriage of justice has been perpetrated here, removing a great deal of potential suspense. This, coupled with too much dependence on loud noises and bright lights (George Dennis and Richard Williamson, respectively) to bring tension, makes what should be a powerful play feel rather flat.

In the end, it is the weight of its authenticity which drags it down – it makes one realise how cumbersome are the machinations of justice systems, and made me never want to be called for jury service.

Execution of Justice is at Southwark Playhouse until 4 February. For more information, visit the website here: http://southwarkplayhouse.co.uk/whats-on/

I got into theatre for the politics. When I was 14, someone bought me a copy of Simon Callow’s book, Being an Actor. In the book, Callow described a company called Joint Stock which he had worked for. The company had made work with a political sensibility – a play called The Speakers based on a book by Heathcote Williams, about the people at Speaker’s Corner; a play called Fanshen by David Hare which examined land reform in rural post-revolutionary China – and the way Callow told it, it seemed like the most vital, important thing anyone had ever done. I dreamed up a world in which theatre really mattered: where it wasn’t just a form of entertainment, which was all I saw around me in my own life, but the place where the most important points of the day were raised and interrogated. I imagined a world where theatre brought news, and was a cutting edge, a conscience. This world was the whirl of politically-conscious theatre Callow seemed to have inhabited the seventies, and it was full of placards and touring theatre companies staving off bankruptcy from day to day.

As the years passed and I began to get involved with theatre, I struggled to keep my dream alive. The companies that toured from factory to factory were thin on the ground in my world, if they existed at all – there weren’t as many factories to tour to, and the heart seemed to have gone out of the ‘poor theatre’ aesthetic that had seemed so glamorous to the 14-year-old me. I dreamed of having a company that could make that kind of work, but couldn’t find the artists who would be willing to join me.

In 2011, I was faced with another challenge. The Arab Spring saw revolution sweep across the globe, and in the face of the pace of events, David Hare, who had been at the forefront of everything I idealised about 70s theatre, said in an interview that events had left him feeling unsure of what to write. I felt the same about my own work – how could I say anything that mattered, that was relevant, in the face of a worldwide revolutionary movement? And moreover, how could I be a cutting edge in an age when the Internet and Twitter meant theatre could only ever reheat old news? I began to wonder whether the lack of enthusiasm for my four-men-in-a-van touring dream wasn’t to do with my not having met the right people, but with having the wrong idea. Perhaps an invasive theatre wasn’t what people needed now.

Next week, my play Missing opens at the Tristan Bates Theatre. I finished the play while I was asking myself these questions about how theatre could be relevant in a political discourse – because I think now, at a time when our society and the whole world seems to be rocking, it is vital that theatre should be politically engaged – and this play is an attempt to use theatre to fulfil a different role to the one I used to imagine. Missing doesn’t exist to shout at anyone; it seeks to give depth and life and perspective to a story we are all living already, to create a space in which an audience have room to reflect on the events pressing in on them in their daily lives.

I am not imagining an argumentative theatre any more. I am trying to imagine a portrait gallery, a place where pictures can be looked at which speak to you, not directly or argumentatively, but by virtue of their content. In imagining this gallery I thought of the plays of DH Lawrence and Franz Xaver Kroetz – exquisite portraits of people living their ordinary lives which passed no comment on the lives depicted, but asked us to pay them attention, quietly insisting these were important people who we could learn from by putting them on a stage in front of us. I am also trying to imagine an echo chamber – a space which doesn’t offer any sound of its own, but allows an audience room to interrogate their own sounds, their own opinions. I thought of two great Royal Court plays, Richard Bean’s Harvest and Jez Butterworth’s Jerusalem, which both, for me, interrogated Englishness without ever forcing the issue, or drawing a conclusion – they had presented a body of evidence, played it before an audience, and asked the auditorium to play back across them.

Missing tells the story of two brothers, Luke and Andy, who are growing up sharing a bedroom under Thatcher in 1980s England. It’s my aim to make people think about their lives without shouting at them – to open a world, and let an audience explore it. The play tries to do something I think theatre is uniquely placed to do – to give depth to life, to ask people to fill in the blanks of a story, an argument, an idea. It’s subtler and quieter than the plays I used to dream of making, but I hope that means people might listen more closely. In a world where we all know the latest news, all the time, perhaps the most effective political role the theatre can play is to take an audience away from their lives for a short while, and ask them to think about what they’re doing with them.

Missing runs at the Tristan Bates Theatre from 31 January – 25 February. You can book tickets online, via email, or call 020 7240 6283.

A Life in Monochrome’s inaugaral scratch performance is the start, the cast assure us, of bigger and better things to come. The programme ambitiously – and not a little pretentiously – declares the newly written play to be a “love letter to the old ‘Noir’ films of the early twentieth century”: it is an attempt to capture the essence of black and white cinematography in the theatre. There is, however, little sense of the ambitious in the actual piece: overladen with cliches, at first glance the play just joins the hordes of other poorly-constructed and -delivered homages. However, the cast’s determination to try to use music to tell the story, not just enhance it, is visionary, and their efforts to capture the spirit of the time and spontaneously jam onstage are very brave.

Although remarkably multi-talented (the cast of five performed on at least a dozen instruments), I would suggest that the preparatory day spent ‘jamming’ was not enough. Rather than creating a tuneful melody that complemented the action, most of the time the ‘music’ was rather a cacophany of noises discordantly played together and working in direct competition with both the dialogue and the actors. On two occasions the music worked as the creators intended it to: firstly in the opening scene where, in conjunction with a great set, good 1920s costumes and well-used lighting, it perfectly captured and conveyed the atmosphere of a smoky speakeasy Chicago jazz club; and secondly, to build up tension as the red-dress wearing Susan Lyons (Claire Sharpe) was chased. This latter scene was partly so effective because the spotlight focused our attention on Sharpe, (in response to a Q&A query, cast and crew should note that music is not distracting in film because, unlike on stage, one cannot see the musicians), and also because the drum beat in sync with her shallow breathing, making us feel that the music was intimately connected to the events going on. The well-timed addition of cello and clarinet helped to build up towards a climax where shouting in unison actually worked – usually this A-level technique should be left in the classroom, but on this occasion I felt real shivers run up the spine. Music’s ability to evoke and create an atmosphere was powerfully manipulated for both these moments, where in others it fell flat or dangerously undermined other theatrical elements.

In a way, the upside of having a Q&A session is also its downside: by discovering what effects were intended, what is not achieved is also starkly highlighted. The supposedly interesting relationship between the two women was never that – partly because all characters seemed only skin deep, and partly because their exposition was so shoddy. Apart from with Detective Bradshaw (Callum Hughes), I never once forgot that an actor was adopting a persona. FAO Jennifer Johnson (Helen): repeatedly rolling your eyes, looking upwards and to your right, and talking to an empty part of the stage (neither engaging in conversation with audience or friend Susan), does not constitute acting. Sharpe actually had some sort of a stage presence, however, forcibly trying every stage trick in the book to appear sultry does not, unfortunately, make you a wanton sex goddess. Less of the posed moves and more apparent enjoyment of being in the limelight would have helped her emanate the confidence and attractiveness she desired.

A huge amount of both character and script development is required to make this a play palatable for any other than the nearest and dearest, and I fear that, as playwrights Callum Hughes and David Shopland are also actor and director, their intimate connection to the piece might prevent them from having the objective distance required. I beg of them: take a chain saw to this piece, hack it to bits, and take only the smallest nuggets from it. Do not build upon existing material and hope the shallow sparks of quality will see it through, but have the courage to transform the sparks into a brand new piece.

Highlights of the new season include:

Brand new community musical, EPIDEMIC , by Morgan Lloyd Malcolm, to be performed in April/May 2012 at the Old Vic Tunnels with a company of 100 young people

• A multimedia musical bringing together a multicultural group of Londoners, that focuses on global health and hygiene
• Auditions open in February 2012

New Voices Edinburgh 2012

• New fringe platform in partnership with IdeasTap and Underbelly, showcasing five new productions from OVNV emerging talent at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe in August 2012
• Expert technical and marketing support will be given to allow new writers to have their work seen by the theatre industry and gain experience in the process
• Applications open now on IdeasTap

Health Wealth Theatre in Schools Production and Schools Tour September

• Continuation of OVNV’s annual schools tour, inspired by contemporary issues affecting young people
• Previous productions have included Think Tank, Go for Green and Sky’s the Limit, addressing conscious consumerism, war and aspiration
• The month-long 2012 tour will use theatre to inspire, debate and educate

The 24 Hour Plays: Old Vic New Voices

• Now in its seventh year, the annual search to find the next generation of theatre stars returns in October 2012
• The project has a history of developing some of the finest producing, writing, directing and acting talent in the UK
• Theatremakers aged 16 to 25 are challenged to write, direct and perform a play in just 24 hours in front of an audience of VIPs and industry experts at the Old Vic Theatre
• Applications open August 2012

Alongside these headline projects, OVNV has a range of programmes to develop emerging creative talent, including 21 performance slots at The Old Vic Tunnels and OVNV’s Activation programme, offering free and discounted theatre tickets, backstage tours, employment opportunities and support for creative projects to people living locally to The Old Vic.

For more information on all creative opportunities offered by OVNV and to sign up for their Opportunities and Events bulletin, see their website, www.oldvicnewvoices.com or http://www.ideastap.com/Partners/ovnv/opportunities_events/2012_season.

Follow OVNV on Twitter @oldvicnewvoices.

Read our live blog from this year’s Old Vic New Voices 24 Hour Plays here and our review of the showcase here.

It is a historical debate whether an actor should draw on his or her own experiences and feelings when trying to create a believable character. It is most notably associated with Stanislavski and the early developments of his system. If one taps into one’s own thoughts and memories to construct a fictional personality, the result can be extremely believable.

It does, furthermore, seem natural to bring into play our true experiences when being creative – it makes a piece more believable, more watchable. However, most people would, I think, accept that distancing oneself from a creative process is perhaps a healthy thing to do. I know that I would find it extremely difficult to use my deepest secrets in their entirety to write, perform, or be creative in some way; there is always an element of having to decorate our truths with imagination and focus on achieving something that is interesting, entertaining and thought-provoking. Nonetheless, there is something about bringing reality into the world of theatre that is extremely captivating.

When sat in the Finborough Theatre last week watching Sometimes I Laugh Like My Sister – a play about Rebecca Peyton’s sister, BBC journalist Kate Peyton, who was murdered in Somalia – I discovered a new kind of theatre constructed from real life events. It was a theatrical experience like no other, darkly comedic and glaringly real, and certainly a piece that uses Rebecca Peyton’s own emotional memories to create something absolutely mesmerising.

Before going to see the production, I knew absolutely nothing about it – sometimes it is nice to go into a show blind, unaware of what you might be getting. I didn’t realise at first that Rebecca Peyton was actually being played by Rebecca Peyton herself – surely someone could not dramatise their own grief? How could someone bear to do such a thing?

The one thing about traumatic experience that I am thankful for is that when I look back on it, I can barely remember what happened. No matter how hard I try, it is mostly a blur. To pour colour, life and energy into a past tragedy would be the most painful of all; the ability to give structure to something that, by its very nature, will always seem unjust and then re-live it over and over is inconceivable to me. Peyton had, however, done just that to her own tragedy, weaving her every thought and reaction into a coherent dialogue and colouring it with dark humour, perfect clarity of expression and deeply considered bodily movements.

In Michael Billington’s article ‘E is for Experiment’ he muses on the paradoxical nature of controversial theatre in our society today – he suggests that it isn’t experimental anymore because “it is often critically praised, subsidised and welcomed into temples of high art like the National”. I know what he means – nothing is really shocking anymore: politics, religion, violence… we’ve heard it all before. Billington then goes on to talk about theatre companies that he believes do have more of a “radical purpose”, such as Cardboard Citizens which creates plays with homeless people – theatre companies that bring theatre into society and tell a true story. I also think we could talk about verbatim theatre here. Docu-plays, such as those from iceandfire, are amazing because they are a platform that can be used to give a voice to people’s real-life experiences – people who ordinarily would never be able to speak out.

So, why is this kind of theatre appealing? Why is it radical? It is because it invites the audience into the performance on a different, and more personal, level whereby we enter into the real lives of the performers in front of us. Something that, if done well, pushes the audience into a new level of experience.  Rebecca Peyton has achieved this, and I hope to see more of it in the future.

Accidental Festival Competitions

Win the invaluable opportunity to present your work at one of London’s top performance venues, the Roundhouse, amongst other cutting edge artists.

Spoken Word- We are searching for new and emerging spoken word artists to perform at this years Accidental Festival. Poems can be on any subject and should be between three- five minutes long.

Please send a video or written text to amy@accidentalfestival.co.uk

Submissions for this competition end 10 February 2012

Rehearsed Readings- Five winners will be selected for our Sunday Showcase, for new writing in development to be trialled and tested in front of an audience.

The evening will be relaxed and friendly, consisting of  a 10-15 minute reading of each script followed by feedback from the audience.

The event will take place in the Studio, a conventional theatre space with raked seating, and a capacity of 96.

We will offer critical feedback for the best twenty submissions to help artists develop their work.

Please send five pages (three minute except) of your play to amy@accidentalfestival.co.uk.

Submissions for this competition end 10 February 2012.

Don’t Forget: Deadline is 31st January.
More Information: www.iyafestival.org.uk

From 29^th June -22 July 2012 the streets and venues of Kingston will come alive as young people from the ages of 5 to 26 showcase the very best in youth arts selected from the UK and Internationally.

For the first time the International Youth Arts Festival will open with a week of participatory projects, workshops and schools engagement work (29^th June – 5^th July).  The latter part of the festival will be the celebration which we have all come to love!  18 days of performances, exhibitions and showcases of incredible youth work from around the world in addition to special events which culminate the projects delivered in the first week.  Applications are encouraged for both parts of the festival as are projects which can deliver engagement at the beginning of the festival, followed by a performance element in the second part.

Applications are open to any arts projects involving young people (0yrs – 26yrs).  These projects may involve young people as performers, creators and artists or as producers and event managers.  IYAF is also happy to receive applications for adult work which is specifically targeted at young people.

Full details are available by clicking on the IYAF 2012 – Participate tab or by clicking on the following links:
Click here to download the Application to participate form for 2012
Click here to download the Guidelines for applicants 2012

For Tom, the decision to work with his father on Frankland & Sons was “prompted by our inheritance of a suitcase of letters, written by my grandparents between 1921 and 1946. I suggested that if we imagined there might be the context of a show contained in them, I could justify spending a fortnight with [my father], reading them. We found more than enough material!”

How, then, did they go about shaping this plethora of stories? “We made the show in a relatively short number of weeks, spread over two years,” Tom explains. “We began by reading the letters and then spent time with just the two of us in a room, putting together some material”. This eventually amounted to eight hours’ worth of narrative. They performed the work at Forest Fringe during the 2010 Edinburgh Festival before getting a residency at the BAC and spending some time at Beaford Arts in Devon, trialling the work before a regional audience as well as a London one.

It was at this point that father and son realised they needed the outside eye of a director to help them strip the show back to its emotional core. So began their partnership with director Jamie Woods. Tom remembers: “We had generated so much material and couldn’t see any more what was the most important”. John agrees, stating that they both “loved the eight hour show and needed an input that saw the work theatrically and not personally”.

Finding a professional distance was always going to be difficult for such a deeply personal project. “The entire piece is very much shaped by our relationship, by our shared sense of humour and by various memories that we have of our lives together,” bsays Tom. John affirms, “Our relationship is woven throughout the piece”. This is what makes the show different, as the duo hoped that “the audience would be intrigued by us performing together and we didn’t want to hide that”, emphasising their offstage connection by recreating their relationship onstage. Tom explains that  ”there isn’t really a plot to speak of. It was clear to us from early on that we didn’t want to describe just the life of Len (my grandfather) but to explore the things that the letters threw up about our own lives and relationship.” So long spent with close family members can often spell disaster, but Tom says, “We have definitely become closer during the making of the show. There is something about working together professionally and as equals that has enabled us to meet each other as adults.”

Theatre is not an alien world for either father or son. The Franklands are a family of theatre-makers, with Tom’s stage debut marked by his performance, aged two, as a dancing bear in a pantomime John was directing. A retired drama teacher with a history of appearing regularly on the amateur circuit in Cornwall, John has “enjoyed a long involvement with ‘am dram’, school productions [and] youth theatre”. He has been more or less involved with theatre for all his life and even had his own company staging plays for a time. “In all of these,” John remembers, “Tom was involved, having stated at an early age that he was going to act. This is the first time I have stepped into his world.” A daunting prospect, then, to step onto the professional stage? “I feel very fortunate that each jump forward [in the development of the show] was accompanied by some generous support and comments, which certainly helped my confidence.”

Since his dancing bear days, Tom has graduated from university and opened up the collaborative father-son relationship to a completely new level through Frankland & Sons. Tom recalls that since he became a professional performer, the opportunities to work together have seemed fewer. However, it is this most intimate of stories that brought the two men together in a partnership woven with trust and love. A play that is about them both has united them both, with John commenting, “it is a joy to spend time with your adult son. It is even better to create something together and a thrill to perform it.” The experience of performance has bound them together in a new relationship; a meeting of minds.

Despite the difficulties of finding opportunities to work together, both feel it is natural that they are now collaborating on the show. Tom muses,“It always felt to me sad that I wasn’t part of a family business – if we were butchers or bakers or plumbers, it would be very natural to follow on into the family business. But on reflection, this is what we have always done through our shared love of theatre and performance.” As well as having the reassuring support of such a close family member in what can be a lonely and daunting industry, “the real benefit is that you have a huge amount of trust and mutual respect for one another”. Tom jokes: “You can read each other well because we have known each other for 33 years!” Father and son both agree the show’s intensity is defined by their innate connection.

“There have been a few moments,” Tom reflects, “where we have been talking about extremely personal matters, like break ups or the relationship Dad had with his parents, but having made the decision to be open and to share our story, we have been able to trust that… it is necessary.” In light of television’s Who Do You Think You Are? success, stories of geneaology were sure to be a hit on stage. But Frankland & Sons is as much about the audience’s own stories as Tom and John’s history. They invite audience members to honestly reflect on their own stories and various skeletons in  closets. As Tom states, “We aren’t trying to say that our family is more interesting than anyone else’s, but to hold a mirror up to the audience and allow them to think of their own families.”

As well as redefining his relationship with his son, John immersed himself in the challenge of completing “the journey from an idea to performance in front of an audience”. A personal and theatrical triumph for John, then, but both confirm that the real benefit of the project has been their renewed connection, with Tom realising they are now “appreciating each other as people… It is nice to discover that we can work so closely together without falling out!” A loyal team, they place each other’s best interests at the forefront of their work. For the Frankland & Sons duo, it is the trivial things in life that mean the most. Their advice for capturing the perfect family balance? “Be respectful and brave and have fun!” And what could be more rewarding than to create and perform with your own family? Perhaps the greatest testament to this is Tom and John’s joint affirmation that Frankland & Sons is “the best thing we have done together.”

Frankland and Sons plays at the Camden People’s Theatre until 28 January. For more information and tickets, please see the Camden People’s Theatre website. The show will then tour. For more information, visit Frankland and Sons.

Image credit: Keir Cooper

Coriolanus

The play sits far from the great tragedies Hamlet, Othello, Macbeth and King Lear, perhaps most distinctly in its divergence from the depth and interiority of the central characters of those plays. Coriolanus concerns itself more with the conflict of leaders and the masses, and the question of democracy is placed at the very heart of the play. At a time when democracy is repeatedly being questioned in both our country and across the world, this is a pertinent play.

For Fiennes to stage Coriolanus would be to reach out to an audience likely more familiar with the play, but to transpose it to the especially wide-reaching medium of film allows the play’s themes and issues to be conveyed to, firstly, a much larger audience, and secondly, to those less familiar with Shakespeare and perhaps less familiar with this play. With Fiennes’s name attached to the project, Coriolanus will surely be able to garner a certain amount of attention. A wise move to bring it to the screen?

It is hard not to observe the layering of screen upon screen within the film, as all of the characters watch each other’s wily moves through reports and video footage. There is, too, the film’s ability to capture the sense of unrest amongst large crowds of people. Here, film seems to lend Shakespeare’s play a helping hand, and reinforces its twenty-first century significance. But what happens to the play’s theatre life? And does it work on film?

Under the watchful eye of Fiennes, the title character’s stunning, lengthy speeches, not naturally transferrable to film, are delivered with a powerful stage presence which does not undermine the film medium. It is at these moments that stage and film seem to merge most beautifully. The final plea of the three women in Coriolanus’s life, led by stage and screen actor Vanessa Redgrave, is shown through a kind of stage blocking, but whilst noticeably theatrical it serves to up the emotional forces at work in this scene. Fiennes merges the techniques of two art mediums to reveal the strengths of both in directing and performing Shakespeare. Are we then left with a powerful theatrical film?

That strange aura which I suggested the film has appears to be something remarkably positive; something new, fresh and most of all engaging. With Coriolanus, Fiennes brings all manner of things to bear on Shakespeare’s play, resulting, in my view at least, in an out-of-the-ordinary, relevant and ultimately striking film. What are your thoughts?

Image by Ben Leto.