Coriolanus (National Theatre Live, 2014)

“I am known to be a humorous patrician, and one that loves a cup of hot wine with not a drop of allaying water in it. One that converses more with the buttock of the night than with the forehead of the morning."

I'm a Shakespeare geek, I suppose, but of his thirty-nine plays I have certainly neither read nor seen them all. So, having neither seen nor read Coriolanus, I'm caught between a first experience of the play- one extraordinary both in itself and in what it has to say in our sadly populist times, where militaristic demagoguery continues to plague us.

I can see why the play is not so popular and well-known as the Warwickshire lad's other late tragedies. It is austere, has a proud and abrasive protagonist who is not inclined to self-aware soliloquys, and assumes a knowledge of semi-mythical early republican Rome, in the 490s BC, where the last king has barely been deposed and where, with the first secession of the plebs, issus of class and war intertwine as the young city state conquers its neighbours.

One must surely imagine this play, with its emphasis on the people, the tribunes, the conflict between arrogant privilege and the popular will, would be much less resonant in early Jacobean times than it is today, where Coriolanus as a proud warrior and would-be tyrant evokes not so much the sadly delusional Trump as the much younger, leaner and more sanely arrogant Cummings. Tom Hiddleston is superb, succeeding in seeming authoritative and believable as a proud and reactionary soldier undone by hubris, his performance full of nice little touches, at limes leavening the tragic gloom with bitter humour. Mark Gatis is similrly superb as Menenius, the humour of his performance concealing dark depths. The sparse production, too, is a triumph, allowing the play itself to succeed by its words and performances. It's just a shame Birgitte Hjort Sorensen of Borgen has such a relatively small part.

Magnificent, both as a play and a performance. Not all tragedies have to be Hamlet, and there's a real power in letting the interior thoughts of the protagonist remain opaque. From Hiddleston I've never seen a finer performance.