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Coriolanus, directed by Ralph Fiennes and starring Fiennes, Vanessa Redgrave, Gerard Butler, and Brian Cox, opened last week in select cities, with screenings to follow across the country in January and February.

Coriolanus is Shakespeare’s final tragedy, and it dramatizes the life of the Roman general Caius Martius. A great warrior, he earns his surname Coriolanus by defeating Rome’s enemies, the Volscians, at Corioles. Often seen as an austere play that does not allow us to sympathize too much with its hero, it does allow us to stand in awe of his tremendous military prowess and his eloquent rage. Most of his anger is spent upon the common people (the plebeians) and their representatives, the Tribunes. Despite his patriotic sacrifices on the battlefield, he is eventually exiled because of the friction with the plebeians, and he ends up joining his great enemy and Volscian counterpart, Tullus Aufidius. Coriolanus is stopped from attacking Rome at the head of the Volscian army only by the last-minute intercession of his wife, Virgilia, and his mother, Volumina, the latter of whom is the single figure in the play with more backbone than her son. This meeting between parent and child has often been played as one of the most emotional scenes in all of Shakespeare, despite the harshness of both characters. Read more…

 The New Word Theatre Project opened its second season of Shakespeare  performance in Cupids, NL on July 24 with The Merchant of Venice, and will add the first part of Henry IV this weekend (August 14).  The summer on the Avalon peninsula has been virtually non-existent in 2011, but the company has toughed out the weather so far, and performances go ahead rain or shine at the partially roofed Indeavour Stage (seen left).

 The night I drove out from St. John’s (Cupids is about 75 minutes from the city), the weather was especially bad; the combination of fog and rain reduced visibility and highway speeds considerably. However, it was merely overcast and cold-ish at the performance site for the start of the show. Read more…

Perhaps you have seen this show before: a group of men gather in a confined space to discuss a past incident (often a crime), the impending consequences of which bear down on them in the present, transforming the stage into to a metaphorical prison; as the men contemplate the threat of exposure or punishment that exists in the offstage world, they confront truths about themselves and their relationships with each other.

Such is the premise of Edward Riche’s Hail, now playing at the LSPU Hall in St. John’s. The four men—professor Gerry, lawyer/businessman Len, junkie Danny, and businessman/kept husband Paul—gather at Paul’s warehouse to discuss a fifth, Lionel, who has been arrested. The men fear that Lionel has been caught for a crime they committed nearly two decades ago when they collectively embezzled money from the university they attended and at which Danny was a security guard. While they await news of Lionel’s fate, they re-visit and argue about the past, debating amongst and with themselves what their crime has made of them, and what they will do if (or before) Lionel confesses to the embezzlement. Read more…

Artistic Fraud’s remarkable (and sold out) production of Robert Chafe’s new play, Oil and Water, revolves around the true story of African American sailor Lanier Phillips. Phillips was serving on the USS Truxton, which ran aground at St. Lawrence (NL) during a storm in February 1942, killing more than one hundred sailors. Local residents managed to rescue 46 of the crew, including Phillips (played as a young man by Ryan Field and as an older man by Jeremiah Sparks).

Chafe, who won the 2010 Governor General’s Award for drama, handles his material brilliantly in a script that shifts smoothly from the lyrical to the mundane to the sacred to the comic. With his extremely economical dialogue, Chafe manages powerfully to convey a great deal in the 90-minute play: Phillips’ terrifying experience in 1942; his efforts to send his daughter Vonzia (Starr Domingue) to an integrated school in Boston two decades later; the slave existence of Phillips’ great grandmother Adeline (Neema Bickersteth); and the harsh lives of mining families in St. Lawrence.  Read more…

 The Fights and Pains of Youth are, in their different ways, historical dramas, though both were clearly written to address their particular contemporary audiences.

Ben Pittman’s The Fights dramatizes the story of Johnny Dwyer (Darren Ivany), a boxer from St. John’s who moved to New York and was the American heavyweight in 1880. The play has two intertwining plot lines. The first concerns Johnny’s home life: his Irish father Bill (Steve O’Connell) is a heavy-drinking former bare-knuckler who lives vicariously through his son; Johnny’s brother William (Jake Fisher) is an ambitious young man rising through the ranks of Tammany Hall-era New York City government who disapproves of Johnny’s career. The second involves the men who make Johnny’s professional career: Harry Hill (Geoff Adams), a Union Army Civil War hero (so it seems) who now operates as a semi-legal fight promoter and bar owner; and Bo Pickett (Larry Barry), a former Confederate soldier on the run for supposed war crimes who (incognito) trains Johnny and ensures that Hill does not cross the boxer as he once crossed Pickett himself. Read more…