‘Coriolanus Vanishes’ could, frankly, have been a monologue about pretty much anything and I’d have found writer-director David Leddy’s production utterly ravishing.
From the laser beam slicing through the air as we arrive, to a startlingly yellow glowing drink that at one point, impossibly, seems to be the only point of light in the room, to a glowing neon bar clutched by performer Irene Allan or a shower of golden paper that rains down on her in the gloom, it is as beautiful a use of light as I’ve ever seen in a play. Enormous credit, then to lighting designer Nich Smith, for the vivid and remarkable world he has created.
The play itself features many of the Leddy’s usual predilections: it’s a disarmingly gentle confessional, peeling back the layers of its protagonist Chris until we’re left with a very different picture of her. It also consistently wrongfoots you: we know from early on that Chris ends up in prison, and that three people will die over the course of the story, but this information really does not come together how you might expect.
Chris, then, seems like a strangely shapeshifting character: with her wife she’s a sort of damaged but loveable failure; with her male lover, she’s a creature of pure sensuality; to her adopted son, she’s an endless source of hope and disappointment. Though she holds down a high powered job at what would seem to be an arms corporation, her life appears to be a mess: there are reasons to severely doubt her mental health, and the weekends are marked by catastrophic cocaine binges. Like Shakespeare’s Coriolanus (a bit, maybe, I wouldn’t dwell on it), she finds it hard to reconcile the different versions of herself: public vs private, ego vs duty, masculine vs feminine, parent vs party animal.
Fascinatingly, the role of Chris was played by Leddy himself last year, in a part that he wrote with the intention of it being playable as a man or a woman. Contemplating how a male Chris might have come across differently is an interesting additional texture; knowing the balance exists also perhaps counteracts some aspects of Chris’s behaviour that might be deemed cliched if the play only swung one way, so to speak.
‘Coriolanus Vanishes’ is an intriguing, well-acted yarn that serves as a study in human duality and human emptiness. It feels like it plays around with various ideas more than it really makes a grand point, but that all adds to its air of disarming gentleness, bound up in that ravishing light design.
