Faultless visuals – shame about the play: the National’s Coriolanus reviewed

Weird play, Coriolanus. It’s like a playground fight that spills out into the street and has to be resolved by someone’s mum. The hero is a Roman general whose enemies conspire to banish him so he takes revenge by joining forces with a foreign power and laying siege to Rome.

Coriolanus’s mother shows up on the battlefield and begs him to drop his vendetta and come back home. Later he dies but without delivering a big speech.

The key difficulty is that Coriolanus’s tragic flaw, a lack of ambition, is really a virtue. He’s far too noble for his own good and his disdain for power makes him annoying rather than admirable. He’s a high-minded windbag, a gabbling fence-sitter, a verbose but overcautious dud.

He may be indomitably brave in battle but he’s also unstoppably prolix in debate.