Shakespeare's grim story about a victorious soldier's scathing contempt for the population he is sworn to protect features battles, betrayals and some heart-wrenching scenes of familial entreaty. When Coriolanus's main prop is a baguette, however, you know you're not exactly in for a night of lavish spectacle. The Chiten company from Kyoto have clearly not taken their lead from Akira Kurosawa's spare-no-expense samurai epics. Baguettes feature prominently, as do toy trumpets, kids' keyboards and a lot of cartoonish voices. This might be the only tongue-in-cheek Coriolanus you're ever likely to see.
Experimental theatremaker Motoi Miura's production is stripped down in another sense: he uses his talented, likable cast as a kind of abstract chorus of four, who play all the secondary roles. They prance, strike poses, mock Coriolanus in lambs' voices; Yohei Kobayashi does an imaginary galloping horse that would make Python proud. Their comic timing is sharp, and when they haul the ranting Coriolanus off stage at the end of the first half you can still hear his tantrums behind the scenes. Miura seems to be saying that the would-be politician who disdains having to "pander" to his public is acting like a child, and ought to be treated as such.
If so, it's a damning indictment of political arrogance that comes couched as absurdist theatre. The battles, such as they are, become stylised tableaux that, frankly, could be anything: lovers courting, geese fighting, a bunch of fat snowmen melting in the spring. There is no psychological realism here, and little trust in the essential drama: Dai Ishida as Coriolanus swings between angry and silly so often that it's hard to care what happens to him, though he gives a remarkably commanding performance considering he spends most of the first half with a basket over his head.
Two musicians occasionally punctuate the action with a glockenspiel or the comically forlorn bleat of a horn. But mostly you're watching people talking. Oddly enough, considering this production is in Japanese, Miura put his trust almost entirely in Shakespeare's language – something few western productions have the guts to do.
It's a touching faith that comes off as unfortunately naive in this spirited, open-air theatre, not least when a military helicopter decides to hover directly overhead and drown out all the voices for 10 minutes, like a metaphor for the plot itself. It doesn't help that the actors seem swallowed up by the big stage and make little use of the proximity of the groundlings beyond a strange, open-handed entreaty to the audience at the end. In a small black room with some atmospheric lighting, Miura's Coriolanus would have a sarcastic magnetism. On the first warm summer night London's had in months, it comes off as a tiny bit politically arrogant.