After starring in Bell Shakespeare’s underwhelming 2023 Macbeth, Hazem Shammas gets a production befitting his acting range and power in Coriolanus, the most obscure of Shakespeare’s Roman plays and one that the company hasn’t staged in three decades.

It is, to the honest, a pretty hard sell. Seldom studied in school and populated by characters that only scholars of the early Roman Republic know anything about, it’s a play that has to convince an audience of its relevance as well as taking it along on a wordy journey of political intrigue set against the background of the Volscian Wars of the 5th century BC.

A tall order, but director Peter Evans meets the challenge in an elegantly minimal, strongly acted production that doesn’t make explicit connections with the present day but nevertheless dances with our love and loathing of the political “strongman”.

Peter Carroll, Hazem Shammas and Septimus Caton in Coriolanus. Photo © Brett Boardman

After sacking the city of Corioli, stronghold of the Volsci, ferocious military leader Caius Martius (Shammas) is titled Coriolanus in honour of his achievement. Not long after, he’s urged to turn his newfound clout into political...