Tullus Aufidius

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Mo Sesay

This is Mo Sesay's first season at Shakespeare's Globe. This is also the first Shakespeare play of his professional career. He has worked in many theatres – the Royal National Theatre, the Tricycle Theatre and the Arcola Theatre to name a few. Mo has appeared in films and appears regularly on television, most recently in Dangerfield.

Bulletin 1

Becoming an actor
How did I get into acting? Well, when my parents split up, when I was a kid, I was home with my dad one Christmas Eve and he had to go to work. I was about six…I was at the house on my own and Bugsy Malone was on the TV and I watched it and I made two promises: I said I’m going to be in Bugsy Malone and I’m going to be an actor. And then we did the play at school and here I am! So that was it really. I just knew. I think it was kind of an escape route - being able to escape this life and be transported somewhere else.

I did amateur dramatics when I was younger. I was convinced I was the best actor in the world! We did a production of Guys and Dolls and I got one of the people in my children's home to come and watch me, convinced that he would be in tears. He was - but because it was so bad! I had a lot of work to do basically. For work experience at school, a lot of my mates went to architects’ offices and stuff, and I said I wanted to go to a theatre. The children's home was near Ashford in Kent and the nearest theatre - the nearest good theatre - was the Hazlitt Theatre in Maidstone and they were doing Godspell if I remember rightly. I was told I wouldn’t be able to do my work experience there but I fought and I got my to week placement. And I was in paradise!

I was fourteen at the time. There were all these really brattish kids who were working in the theatre and they went to a local stage school and I came back to the staff in the home saying ‘I want to go there. I want to go to that stage school.’ Now I’m really grateful they didn’t let me go and that instead I had to do my A levels and grind it out. So I did more amateur dramatics and applied for drama schools and got into Weber Douglas - it was just brilliant. I loved it. I loved everything about it.

When I was growing up in the children's home, I wasn’t allowed to go to the local grammar school because they made a decision - I don’t know why - to keep me at the comprehensive school. I was really cheesed off about it. All the people I used to go around with were thugs. Some of them are dead, some are in prison. I used to do my homework and they used to come and they would burn it - these were my friends! - and say, “You’re coming down the pub” so we’d end up getting drunk.

I’d been dumbing myself down in a sense, so when I came to drama school I remember (it's a bit corny) there was an old pub on the corner with sawdust on the floor with all these young, very pretentious people now looking back. I was wearing two different coloured baseball boots because I thought it looked really cool, a Converse red and black, I thought I looked really individual. And there was this friend wearing a trilby hat and a coat. When we got to know each other I admitted that I’d never worn those shoes before and he’d never worn that hat and coat. But it was cool because we were expressing ourselves.

Being an actor
I was doing really well, acting on TV and in films and going off on location for three months at a time but a lot of my friends are things like architects and doctors and stuff and I just thought what the hell am I doing? I got married and I was imagining my kids asking what did you do at work today daddy? Er, I dressed up as a girl. And so a few years in to my career I had a bit of a crisis - acting kind of didn’t make sense to me so I was retraining for a while, to take a degree in economics. I was really interested in that and that's something I will pursue I think one day. But then I got a really good part at the National and came back to my senses!

There was a period of time, where I was really ambivalent, for about seven years and it's really interesting. There's a big gap in my CV but I’m grateful for that…acting's good but it's also important to draw from other aspects of life because otherwise you’re just acting ‘acting’, if you see what I mean, and I think that's really boring actually. It's definitely important to be plugged into life. I would imagine that someone like Shakespeare I would imagine would have been very much involved seen or been privy to different aspects of and other walks of life it just makes for a richer experience for you and for the audience.

Shakespeare
At drama school there was this teacher, Judith Jick, I don’t know how well known she was in the industry but she taught John Hurt and Anthony Hopkins at RADA so she was about 173,000 years old and she was brilliant. I remember getting up in front of the class to do Shakespeare and I said, ‘I can’t do this, I can’t do it’. I was really nervous there were lots of girls and people at the school who were kind of posh and had stables and stuff. And she said to me, ‘What are you talking rubbish for? You’ll just make sense of it and say it. Don’t make a big fuss about it’. And because she unlocked that kind of thing around Shakespeare, and made it not just something for the upper classes, it let me in and I thought ‘Yeah, it's everyone's birthright’. You tap into it and think, ‘My God! It's a treasure trove’.

Funnily enough this is the first time that I’ve performed Shakespeare professionally. I left drama school in 1989 and I haven’t spoken Shakespeare professionally in all that time. Yeah! I can’t wait. I love it. This is my first love. My theory is that if you can do Shakespeare and Shakespearean comedy (because anyone can kind of rant and rave) if you can actually successfully do that I personally think you can do anything because it's just the most complex, brilliant and simple in it's complexity. But if you can tackle that you can do anything.

I think the reason I’ve not done Shakespeare professionally before is because people looked at my CV and saw a lot of film and TV. I entered the business for the art but when it came to payday I was corrupted! But now, without sounding too up myself, of course you want to do good projects and get paid loads but actually I would love regularly to do Shakespeare because it just nurtures. It's a multivitamin for the soul.

Preparation for the play
To prepare for my role I read the play and that's it. I just concentrated on the speaking of it. I kind of came into the Globe as a blank canvas. I wanted not to be putting too much into it and I‘m glad because there are so many good people here it's just great. So many big brains. I think it's going to be really exciting. The cast is fantastic and I’m so lucky because my character is only on stage at the beginning and the end of the play so I get to go to the bar in the middle! It's great. Aufidius goes on a complete journey and changes his mind about the main character so many times. I think the actor Brian Cox says I don’t mind how small the character I play is as long as the script has a beginning, a middle and an end and there's definitely that for my character. And I think he's as brave as or nearly as good as Coriolanus. I get to act with the main character and all the other excellent actors. And I get to have a sword!

Bulletin 2

First day of rehearsals
It's terrifying! You basically come in and there's real, tangible excitement but also fear. It's a heady concoction. Everyone's looking at each other, sussing each other out. It felt like there were about 8 million people in the room who were introduced and we were all just thinking I hope these people aren’t all staying for the read through. And thank goodness about half of them left.

And then we did the read through. It's really good because Dominic is really not precious. He's really clever but he's not one of those people who flaunts it in your face. And I really like the cast. When I come into a rehearsal I just have to be open and I think a lot of actors do this. I think that's why I like actors because they’re vulnerable a lot of the time. You just have to say yes to the experience and try everything. I think it was George Bernard Shaw who said “What is theatre? It's a private spectacle made public.” And that's exactly what it is. And so you have to do that. So the first day was brilliant. It was really tiring actually… I walked past a building site the other day and I saw some guys and they were digging and I thought that's real work. But then I thought when you’re in a rehearsal and when you’re a writer these people are digging metaphorically for ideas. It's great work. It was a great day. It was tiring it was a good introduction.

We did discuss the play. Dominic told us about his ideas for the season, for us and then he discussed what the themes were in the play and it all felt good and very unintellectual. Very robust but not dry - that's the joy of bringing it to life. We had lectures by Farah Karim-Cooper, the Globe Education Lecturer. It was brilliant. This place is just so well resourced. She gave us a lecture about Rome and the relationship between Elizabethan/Jacobean society and Rome and why England looked so fondly to Rome in terms of the architecture of the Globe. It was fascinating. Wonderful.

The next day we had Giles who is brilliant. Just brilliant! He was an actor, went to Oxford to do history and got obsessed with the meter and rhythm of Shakespeare so he's helping us decode the text in terms of the speaking and stuff. We’re working from the first folio…I think this is because Dominic was saying that the punctuation is more accurate. There's a wonderful thing where it's laid out on the page in such a way to reflect speech patterns so you can see thoughts interrupting other thoughts, characters sharing lines and other intricate details. It's great .It aids learning. And Giles is very much concerned with making sense of the words - not directing but directing our understanding of the text and the rhythm and the fact we should be putting stresses in particular places or giving us an option and making us aware of that.

On the second day Giles talked about poetry and prose. He spoke about the differences between these two ways of writing and the different effects that can be created through employing them. It's just amazing! I’m seeing Giles again tomorrow. He's so clever and so humble. And then you start to understand why Shakespeare's brilliant.

I’m someone who likes to sit on my bum and talk a lot to mask the fact that I’m terrified. And we did sit down for a bit but then Dominic told us to stand up. He laughs - there's lots of laughter in his room. And it just helps, you know. So we got it up and we were just mucking around and laughing and it just takes the tension out. So yes, we have got the play up on its feet. We’re a week short of rehearsal time so it's a shorter time to rehearse and in a way I think that's good because it forces you to make decisions.

I always have a very definite way of rehearsing. A lot of acting in this country is cerebral and I love actually doing it. I like to know a line because it's about transmitting these words to an audience, not with your voice but through what you’re doing. Acting is doing. So we’ll go through the script. And the reason why Shakespeare is so brilliant because it's all encoded in there – everything you should do is included in the words!

The way that I work is learn the words, take the notes from the director, put the actions it and then you have a different combination of actions so each night you play it you can come up with variants as long as you keep your super objective. But it's different, working with Shakespeare, because there are so many other layers. And I feel really lucky because Jonathan Cake [who plays Coriolanus] is doing all the hard work. We’re lucky, we’ve got lots of lovely bits and he's having to drive it. I know how difficult it is because I played Oedipus last year and it was exhausting. So that's how I work.

What I try and do is wait for the inspiration from the rehearsal floor to see what the director will say. I try not to come in with too many ideas because sometimes if you do that you’re sewing it up before you’ve had time to breathe. What's nice about this is that all of the actors get to see experts in text, voice and movement as well as Dominic. I’ll see what comes of that then I’ll action it afterwards. Working on Coriolanus is better than a modern play text because it feels less general. Shakespeare's texts are encoded which actions that fit the words – I can’t think of any examples right now! But you can read your lines and then go back and put an action to them and really quickly you find you’re not just standing on stage like a lemon thinking when's my next line? Someone gives you an impulse and I know how I respond to that. So if I’ve got my action in my head and with that action comes the line.

Bulletin 3

Movement
The character that I am playing is Italian and I have been talking about this with my wife, who is Italian. I saw a production of The Merchant of Venice in Italy and what I really noticed about it was the way that the actors moved. It was fascinating and sometimes so different to how British people use body language.

This play is set in Rome. There's a moment in the play when I’m saying a long list of nasty things that I’m going to do to Martius and while I’m saying the lines I’ve been thinking about the gestures I make. I’ve been talking to my wife about Italian hand gestures and then thinking about gestures that support the meaning of the words and the nature of my character. When I put the words with the movement, the meaning seems to come alive. There's another thing where Adrian, Aufidius's right hand man, says ‘He's the devil’ to Coriolanus and I say ‘Bolder, but not so subtle’ and I draw my thumb down my cheek. People might not know what it means but deep down they will know it.

It's just those little things that make the performance more textured and specific and that's when it becomes really exciting. When De Niro does something on film and you remark on it or if Al Pacino or Judy Dench do something subtle that you notice, it's because, whether intentionally or unintentionally, they’ve done something that penetrates your subconscious.

The Volscian state where Aufidius is from is literally 20 miles from Rome. I’ve been following the Italian elections and the way that the Italians move is completely different to the way that we move over here. So that's what I’ve been doing, going through my script and seeing if there are any sentences that can be punctuated with a particular kind of nuanced thing that is a whole language in itself. Rehearsals

It's been very good this week. It's very odd playing this character because he's just at the beginning and the end really substantially so when you come in you feel like you’re starting again. But it's such a great atmosphere and Dominic is so unprecious about the text and he's so welcoming of ideas and I think that's the mark of somebody who knows what they’re talking about.. It's nice because you can go away and get to know your part and explore your own methods and bring that into the rehearsals. You don’t kind of talk about your methodology, he just says what he wants you to do and you do it.

I always get immersed in the world of the play itself. There are a couple of books I’m going to start reading – I can’t remember the names of them. The first book is a whodunit set in Roman times which will be exciting. I also read this book a little while back by Edward Rutherford called London which was a historical novel about London. There was a chapter in there about Shakespearean London and I want to read stuff like that so I know more about that time.

Learning my lines
I know all of my lines now. For me, that's a foundation. I think that learning lines is obviously very important otherwise you can’t perform the play but it's not just knowing the words but also knowing what you’re saying with the line. The line is just on the surface and it's the subtext that matters. I very much believe in ‘actioning’ – putting actions with the words. For me, it very much brings the play to life. I don’t understand Shakespeare particularly and so sometimes I think in terms of a silent movie - you know what those guys were doing even though there were no words and I try to the same thing with all my characters. So, with Shakespeare especially, I think if they can see the pictures you’re creating with you’re body and the interactions with the other characters it makes the whole thing much more palatable.

Aufidius
What's important to remember is that Aufidius is a politician as well as a soldier and that's an interesting mix. He changes his opinion towards Coriolanus two times in the play. Even though he's not in the as much as everybody else the character's journey is just brilliant. There's a scene that we’ve just rehearsed in which Aufidius is saying he's going to bring Coriolanus to his knees. It's very wordy and very cerebral and, although I’m really enjoying it, I think it will just take time to sink in and to think like a politician basically.

I feel comfortable playing the soldier and the politician but at different places in the play. There's a part at the end in which Aufidius is being very much a politician. It's like a famous court room scene and I think every actor would love to play a court room scene. It's a scene where he's publicly bringing Coriolanus to his knees and I love that. Because you’ve got all the references to the great movies and you start to kind of pretend to do all that.

That scene is a very show off scene, whereas other scenes are much more intimate and the danger with an intimate scene, especially in this theatre, is that you can become very small. In a more intimate scene you still have to make it clear what it happening in the character's mind. It's easier in the shouting scenes because you’re bringing him down in front of everybody.

To make us aware of these issues of clarity all of the actors work with Stewart [Pearce, the Globe's voice expert]. He used to be my voice teacher when I was at drama college and he's just great! I always make sure I do a warm up and I do a lot of swimming because that's brilliant for increasing lung capacity. Glynn [McDonald, the Globe's movement expert] has given us an exercise which is basically four movements that pertain to the four elements: earth, air, fire and water. It balances you and it allows you to just be in the space rather than force everything. I think when you force your voice or you force an action, that's when the audience has difficulty in connecting with you. Reassuringly, we’ve been told that the Globe's acoustics are great and you can be heard when you whisper so I think it's about feeling relaxed and balanced on stage.

Stage fighting
Stage fighting is great fun. Jonathan [who plays Coriolanus] is very good. He did a whole season in Rome pretending to be a gladiator, so he's very secure with a lot of it. Our fight director is great too. And I’ve actually got a black belt in karate and martial arts but it's a very different thing so I always tell people that I’m not very confident in stage fighting and there's a truth in that. You shouldn’t assume that because you can do one type of combat that you can do stage fighting because acting is another layer on top of the stage fighting. But in terms of the body mechanics it's wonderful and you find that your sense memory remembers things quite quickly. And again, doing it on the stage is great.

Shakespeare is so brilliantly detailed so a lot of what we have to do is all there in the text and what you try to do in the storytelling of the fight is to match the nature of the text. There are no surprises because Shakespeare tells you what he wants, it's encoded, and you just have to try and do that service. Rene, the fight director, is very good at decoding what we should do. At the moment, we’re trying to decide at the end of the fight whether Coriolanus is about to beat Aufidius or if we do it another way. Coriolanus is the better soldier by a margin, I would say. Afterwards, Aufidius says to Coriolanus you’ve beaten me 5 times and it's always going to be the same. It would be the same result if we fight as often as we eat, so I’m going to think of another way to bring you down because I can’t do it fair and square - and that's what we’ve tried to show in the fight.

We’re using real swords that are being made in the U.S.A. apparently. They’re going to be two swish swords and hopefully we’re going to get to pose around with them. That’ll be cool.

Acting techniques
I remember this activity from drama school which is a very simple, basic thing of accept and build. What this means is if somebody gives you an idea you run with it. There's all manner of reasons why you could resist an idea but I tend to be overly open in the rehearsal room, even if somebody comes up with a wacky idea because I think that allows you to bond quicker with the other actors and just allow the creative process to flow through you. If you start to block things you basically just seize up and I think it's an actor's job not to do that. I just say yes to everything!

Bulletin 4

There's always a period in rehearsals when you’re very exposed – like on the first day read through because you’ve been reading in your bedroom you know and you’re winning Oscars and BAFTAs! Then there's the next level –like peeling onion layers off - when you get up on your feet and you get a comfort zone reading from the script and then the next level is without the script, then the technical rehearsal and then the real thing on stage.

What's lovely about this company is we’ve always been welcomed to come along to the rehearsals of any of the scenes. Everyone's been busy, we’ve been doing our own stuff, but when I did happen upon other people's scenes it was just lovely and I actually discovered stuff about my character's journey by being there.

Now we are in the final stages of the rehearsals, we’re reaching a point when a certain type of note be given to you [advice from the director]- the notes become more and more subtle because I think the director is seeing more and more of a human being, more and more of the character, so you can afford to really go for it.

When I was working on the text with Giles, we ‘packaged’ the different thoughts my character has and during the earlier stages of the rehearsal I tended to deliver those ‘packages’. One of the things that Dominic has been saying to me is I have to find the bridges quicker - the bits that join up the ideas - and have a through line. I think that's also to do with changing gear and getting your head around the robustness and kind of the multitude of thought that's issuing from one person. Once you become more comfortable with that then – eventually - then it all comes together.

Doing the play all the way through
Everything has intensified this week. The clock has been ticking! I think last week we did four runs – Wednesday, Thursday, Friday and Saturday and that really helped. It was really interesting to see the progress; the first run was just anger and adrenalin, just shouting – when in doubt shout! – and everyone was just terrified. On each of the runs, different ones of us guys seemed to ‘get it’. Probably the best analogy I can think of is surfing – some of us caught the waves on some days and some on other days – but I think everybody had a glimpses here and there throughout.

The first time we started to run it I saw the play as a tragedy for the first time. I saw what Jonathan [who plays Coriolanus] was doing was really quite brilliant in as much as I kept on wanting him to shut his mouth ‘No go and say that you love the people. Show them your wounds and everything will be fine’ but Coriolanus couldn’t do it and I kept on thinking ‘Why not? It's easy’. In terms of how the performance grew I could really see what it has become and it was really touching.

Technical rehearsals
People either love it or hate it – it's the Marmite factor I think! Technical rehearsals are crucial in transforming the play from the rehearsal room with jeans and T- shirts into the real space. It's just fantastic, it's really exciting. I keep on grinning! There's a lot of waiting around, a lot of concentrating. At worst and best it's a chance actually to re-run and work things out with not as much pressure on us as usual because the pressure is really on staging the entrances and the exits. In a normal theatre it would be lighting as well but obviously we don’t have that so very much the emphasis is on the live music, costume changes and working out how things come on and off.

Costumes
It's just fabulous! Coriolanus is dressed in red, lots of lovely deep reds. I think that's to associate him with Mars, the god of war (Mars – Martius – Coriolanus). My costume is brown and blue for a contrast. I remember Dominic [the director] saying at the auditions that Aufidius is a bit of a show-off, so you’ve got a few things going on – and the colour scheme is different so you can decipher Romans from Volscians

I’ve got armour. It's made out of chain-mail and leather and I think some people have armour that has much more metal – breastplates and stuff. My costume is very fashionable – I’ve got tassels and a cape! When you’re wearing your costume and you’ve got your sword and your scabbard it just make you feel like you’re really in the part.

Fight scenes
The fight scenes have been going really well. We’ve been working out how to do them with the costumes on. We have capes on and they’re very not practical. The capes dig into the Adams apple and around your neck so all these bits and pieces are being worked out to make it smooth and safe. Jonathan and I do a bit of punching and a bit of grappling on the jetties in the yard. It's interesting and our fight master is there so we’re going to be making it safe with him

Blood
I have some blood on me at some points. We have to be careful that we don’t get any on our costumes. I got told the other day that my costume costs around£6000 because it's been custom made. The stockings alone cost £200! The feel of wearing the fabric is just amazing.

Feelings about the first night
I was so scared when I got the job that I was preparing weeks in advance so I’ve been scared for quite a while! But actually that's great. It's healthy trepidation. There's got to be some butterflies because that's where the magic is – I keep telling myself that anyway!

Bulletin 5

Press night
I think the first nights are not necessarily a reflection of how the work will develop and mature, or the work you have already done. But I think people liked it, but the proof is in the audiences we get throughout the season. The show got good reviews, Dominic got good reviews, individual actors even got good reviews, but then conversely, a lot of us got bad reviews, and we’ve seen that happen with Titus Andronicus too. It's just so arbitrary.

This one was a bit special because it was the first night of a new regime – Dominic Dromgoole's first season as Artistic Director - , so we were all willing Dominic and the new regime to be welcomed in and to be favoured. And I think for the most part they were.

Reviews
One of the papers did a composite review, a review of all the reviews that have been written in all of the papers. I’m told that overall the show got a composite mark of something like 7/10 or 8/10 which is pretty good I think. I try not to read any reviews. I read them all afterwards, when it is too late to do anything. I think I learnt this from an older actor, because he told me that you play the reviews whether they are good or bad, so when someone said ‘I loved that thing that you did’ you take it to heart and you play it up and it becomes distorted; your performance is no longer in balance. And conversely, if they say something bad about what you have done, that is really upsetting if you don’t have a very thick skin. I think many actors have quite a thin skin because we are ‘open’ and it does affect you.

First night
During our technical rehearsals we had a great experience because there were various school tours going round the theatre as we rehearsed and at points Dominic would grab a group and say ‘Can you be the groundlings please?’ So I thought that the first night would be easy because we had been used to having all these people watching. But it is actually very different! We had a full house so there were lots and lots of faces but what was great about it was that they just wanted us to succeed. I was actually very nervous but everything I did, they clapped!

The audience
I love it being able to see the audience and make eye contact. I was very lucky to do a show in the round called Oedipus at the Arcola Theatre. The play was told in a similar way to African story telling and that is very much the same technique as you use with the Globe. We had our version of the groundlings, but we had rush matting all around, and people sat on that with cushions. That was for a 6 week run of Oedipus and that was great preparation. It was good to have done that because walking out into a packed Globe Theatre wasn’t as much of a shock as it would have been.

I find it great to be able to see the audience because there are lines that you can specifically direct at the audience. There is one moment when Coriolanus comes to Aufidius’ house and says, ‘Look, I’ll fight for you if you’ll have me, if not, kill me.’ And I say something like ‘it's great to have you.’ And there is one line when I am mock warning him, I tell him ‘Why thou Mars! I tell thee/ We have a power on foot…' and the power on foot seems to me to be the groundlings and so when I say that line I look into the yard. It is almost as if it was written just for them! So it is actually great because you can use the audience to direct your actions.

Weather
The poor cast of Titus Andronicus have had rain during almost every performance. We’ve been fairly lucky and have had lots of fair weather. One night, however, the weather became part of the performance! At one point, Coriolanus takes his mum's hand when she comes to beg him not to raze Rome to the ground and he says ‘Oh mother, what have you done? Behold the heavens do ope’. And at that exact moment it started to rain! The audience laughed of course. I think there is something really magical about acting with an open roof. There's loads of stuff that Aufidius says to Coriolanus ‘Look at yonder cloud…’ or ‘The moon…’ and so on, and at various performances you can see the moon or you can see the clouds. It's just really lovely.

Bulletin 6

Keeping the run fresh
The truth is you just have to keep yourself open. I think Mark Rylance [the Globe's previous Artistic Director] said that one thing the Globe space demands is that you are in the moment and you try and be as in the moment as you can. The way to keep the play fresh is to just keep open to the impulses that might affect you on any given night. But some nights you sort of go onto automatic pilot but I think you know when you do that. It's hard. It's a real discipline. A friend of mine who does martial arts asked me if it was boring doing the same thing over and over again. I said to him that at its best, it's ‘Zen’, which is repetition until you become enlightened. It is all about a state of mind and what you have to do is elevate it.

I think I am very lucky with this play because my character comes in a little bit at the beginning and then he is spoken about a lot and then he comes in intermittently in the second half of the play. My entrances are spaced out in quite an ideal way in that it is quite difficult to get bored. I think that problem would arise more if you were doing smaller parts or a larger part more consistently. But how do I correct myself if I think I’m zoning out? I just give myself a metaphorical slap round the chops and hope I can shake it off!

New discoveries during the run
I don’t think I’ve uncovered lots of new discoveries about my character but I have definitely found things about the ways you play the role and the different impulses you follow. Some nights I enjoy setting up Coriolanus’ character for his fall and sometimes I don’t. I think there is a real contradiction going on within Aufidius - I’ve always known that but I think it surprises me to find out which one happens on which night. It's important to be open to that contradiction. Again, it is all about being in the moment. Sometimes I think Coriolanus is pathetic and others I feel sympathetic, it's very ambiguous. I love the character of Aufidius so much because it is not clear cut. He is almost a warrior but then he is almost a politician. I think someone commented that there are not a lot of rhyming couplets in the play, and that this denotes high thought, and he has quite a lot of that. He's very quick as well in terms of his changes. He hates Coriolanus, then he loves him, then he hates him again and then he isn’t sure and it all changes very fast. There is a discovery every night because it's always slightly different.

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