'He's a total monster, but society needs him': power and politics in Coriolanus
Director Ivo van Hove describes how he turned Shakespeare's Roman plays into a six-hour study of murder, mistrust and the modern-day mediaMy interest in Shakespeare's Roman plays was their politics: politics as mechanism, not psychology. When we started to work on the piece we called The Roman Tragedies " a version of Coriolanus, Julius Caesar and Antony and Cleopatra that eventually went on stage in 2007 " the aim w…