As earlier noted, Stephen�s Coriolanus displayed a youthful dependency on his mother�s approval that was emphasised by his urgent, almost delinquent re-assurances to her that he would take her advice about dealing with the plebeians in 3.2. He dashed around the stage, hat in hand on �Look, I am going� (3.2.134) like a child eager to please his mother. Hands� casting of the more mature matinee idol Dance �fresh out of the multi-gym� , created a substantially different dynamic. Rather than attempt to construct a mother-child dynamic exemplified in Thacker�s production, Hands instead chose to eroticise it. When Volumnia entreated her son in 3.2, she always touched his face with one hand and pressed the other onto his chest. This gave their relationship an oedipal slant, with Jeffers pressing her son against a wall and leaning on him during her entreaty,
Volumnia: O, sir, sir, sir,
I would have had you put your power well on
Before you had worn it out.
Coriolanus: Let go.
Volumnia: You might have been enough the man you are
With striving less to be so.
(3.2.15-18)
Coriolanus� request �Let go� was not made to a Volumnia who had merely taken his hand (as in Thacker), but rather one pressing her whole body onto him. Though this aspect of their relationship was only emphasised in glimpses � Coriolanus was always his mother�s soldier first and foremost rather than a lover � Hand�s suggested a viable reading in sexually charging the relationship; Coriolanus is after all the one individual she seems to gain any gratification from in the play. It was perhaps only a shame that they did not press the idea a little further, as almost all of the press failed to acknowledge it in their reviews.
Volumnia�s pivotal entreaty to her son in 5.3 also bore many similarities to the Thacker production. Again, a motionless Coriolanus stood defiant while Volumnia bowed to his feet in a gesture of supplication. Dance emphasised his initial unwillingness to listen by striding downstage and staring out into the audience, his back to mother, wife and child. But during the speech given below, Volumnia slowly crept behind her son and finally embraced him from behind on her final line:
This fellow had a Volscian to his mother;
His wife is in Corioles, and his child
Like him by chance. Yet give us our dispatch.
I am hushed until our city be afire,
And then I�ll speak a little.
(5.3.178-182)
Rather than the dramatic break-down of Stephens, Dance�s Coriolanus seemed to have something die quietly inside him on his mothers final words. His head sunk down, and in a silence of ten seconds he slowly took his mother�s hand. When he finally attempted speech, the words could barely be heard; the lines were delivered as if he had already been considering the consequences of yielding well before his actual capitulation. The suggestion that Coriolanus, rather than simply being reactionary was making a conscious but painful and paradoxical choice, seemed to fit with Coppelia Kahn�s assessment that �to relent as he finally does means to feel pity and love for the first time, to be more of a man and yet, paradoxically, less than ever his mother�s son. Therefore, the final image of the two locked together in a backward embrace had various resonances. It was simultaneously a mother cradling her defeated child, a staging of Volumnia�s earlier Hecuba-Hector comparison in 1.3, and an embrace that sealed Coriolanus� fate. Poignantly, the stage-image of somebody dealing a fatal blow (either emotional or physical) to Coriolanus from behind would later re-appear in Aufidius� final slaying of him.
Despite this melancholic ending to the scene, what became most noteworthy was how Jeffers, unlike Blakiston, didn�t seem mortified by her son�s defeat. Whereas Blakiston was a mother struggling to comprehend the gravity of what she had just done, Jeffers� face hardly flickered. This was a mother who knew that the sacrifice of her only son was required by the state, and had already turned her enterprise onto the young Martius. The discrepancy between Jeffers� and Blakiston�s playing of the character was never more obvious in the family�s return to Rome. Rather than shuffle around the stage half-dazed, 5.5 became Volumnia�s most triumphant moment. By her hand she led the young Martius, dressed in armour, to the front of the stage and presented him with a sword. Her silence came not from mortification but exultation: her transformation into Rome�s heroine, coupled with her final victorious possession of a new soldier to form, meant words were unnecessary now. In this scene Virgilia, guarded by Valeria (Jan Maud), was left to the side of the stage, forever parted from her son. In direct contrast to Hibbard�s conclusion, Hands� reading of Volumnia rendered her unrepentant, victorious and significantly distanced from her step-daughter: a woman who in her hand held �the life of Rome� to come. His production seemed to suggest that if Volumnia gained pleasure from turning her soldier into a peerless warrior, she also took delight in being able to defeat him and start again: like an emperor, she ultimately had the final say in who rose and fell.
