When Shakespeare wrote his tragedy Coriolanus he was coming off the back of an outrageous run of successes. In just a few years he’d penned Othello, King Lear, Macbeth and Antony and Cleopatra. This was a writer at the peak of his powers, and with Coriolanus he pushed himself into even more daring territory.
And yet the coming Bell Shakespeare production of Coriolanus is the first that Australia’s pre-eminent adapters of the Bard have mounted in almost 30 years, and only the second time Bell has tackled the play at all. The last time around, the title role was played by company founder John Bell. This time, the fearsome Coriolanus will be incarnated by Hazem Shammas, who both wowed audiences and divided critics as Macbeth in Bell’s 2023 production.
“I am working the hardest I ever have. A marathon is an understatement. I thought Macbeth was a marathon but this way surpasses it,” he says.
Hazem Shammas will star in Bell Shakespeare’s production of Coriolanus. Credit: Janie Barrett
Why is this play performed more rarely than Shakespeare’s more obvious crowd-pleasers? Shammas says it’s a more complex and ambitious work. “It’s a big block of granite and it is like Michelangelo carving his forms out of this rock. That’s hard work. Maybe we’re not liking hard work any more.”
The rewards are many, though: “the depth and complexity of his poetry, the writing and the insights, and the way he expresses psychological and dramatic states”.
Bell’s Coriolanus gives audiences the rare chance to see a Shakespeare play they might know nothing about. The story is surprisingly simple, Shammas says. After defeating his enemies in the Italian town of Corioli, the Roman general Caius Marcius is given the nickname Coriolanus. As he ascends the ranks of Rome’s political power structures, however, he grows angry at the democracy that gives non-military citizens any form of power and eventually defects to the side of his former foes, to team up and try to take on Rome itself.
“It’s either Rome’s destruction or his destruction. He’s a highly decorated war hero with not much political nous,” says Shammas.
The machinations of war hawks and power-hungry despots certainly aren’t alien to our lives today but Shammas says this is because they’ve always been with us. “It’s a study on power and its tentacles. However they’re playing out now, it’s not new. It’s cyclical, and it keeps happening and happening.”
For that reason he thinks of Coriolanus as a kind of morality play. It’s provocative but he hopes audiences will engage with what they see. “If they’re willing to bring themselves to it as political humans with ethics and morals and ask themselves questions honestly about what comes up in the play, they’re going to have a great night out. They’re going to take something away.”
Hazem Shammas as Macbeth for Bell Shakespeare’s 2023 season.Credit: Pierre Toussaint
Not that a night at the theatre is any kind of cure-all. “It makes me sad because we keep telling these stories, and we keep having these rituals together to share these stories, and we don’t seem to learn, or we don’t even see it around us.”
Coriolanus himself is a monster, Shammas says: “There should be absolutely no sympathy for him.”
At the same time, you don’t have to look far to see monsters these days. “I guess we all have capacity to be monsters. That’s perhaps what it’s about. Temptations of power … maybe being a monster is not that hard. This guy, it doesn’t seem like there’s much effort in his blood-lust because society allows it. Or society worships it, actually.”
Shammas is keen to emphasise that the production doesn’t treat a play by one of the great masters of theatre as a vehicle for any particular politics of today. It doesn’t need to. “What’s fascinating is that Shakespeare can sit and have these meditations and write this for us to ponder 420 years later. It’s all in the text. It’s all in the script.”
It’s one of those roles that requires its performer to have the sort of life experience a young actor probably can’t claim. Like King Lear, you don’t give Coriolanus to a 20-year-old. Now 50, Shammas is confident he has the goods: “the wisdom … well, at least, experience”.
He’s certainly enjoying a long streak of success. For his turn in 2018’s TV thriller Safe Harbour he won a Silver Logie for most outstanding supporting actor. He was nominated for an Audience Choice Award for The Twelve at the 2022 AACTAs and has had recurring roles in Bump, Ladies in Black and other film and TV productions.
I am working the hardest I ever have. A marathon is an understatement.
Live theatre is a different beast, of course. You’d think the challenge of such a demanding role, night after night, would be heightened even further given Coriolanus’ wife Virgilia will be played by his real-life partner Suzannah McDonald. The last time they played opposite each other was in Bell’s 2013 production of The Comedy of Errors. The tone of that play couldn’t be further from this tragedy.
The creative bug runs in Shammas’ extended family, too. His cousin Hanna is one of Haifa’s leading satirical comics; his uncle and godfather Anton is a novelist and professor in Michigan; another cousin has made his name as a cinematographer. “You know, Palestinians – we’re storytellers,” he says.
Not that any of that was enough to have the young Hazem’s parents unreservedly encourage his acting career. “I had a first-gen ethnic father who said I had to get a proper job before I became an actor. So I did a degree and worked in construction and probably should have flown to Dubai and built towers when all my other graduate friends were travelling over there.”
He maintained his interest in the arts while studying for that more practical degree, and the skills he learnt have proven surprisingly helpful since. “Dabbling in the arts and creative thinking was a nice balance to dabbling in engineering and constructive thinking. That’s such an amazing skillset that I have that I can apply to all processes. To acquit projects is a skill that everyone should be able to learn.”
He did finally study acting – a one-year course at Sydney’s Actors Centre led to a three-year degree at the prestigious Western Australian Academy of Performing Arts (WAAPA). He’d satisfied his parents’ pragmatic expectations and was free to pursue his dream.
“The most beautiful success story about my parents is that they came out here with nothing and, yes, they’re poor, but they did give us education and freedom. That’s the most perfect legacy.”
Shammas has three young sons of his own now and, with two actors as parents, they’re growing up around film sets and theatres.
The nature of the business means periods working long days and nights alternate with more hands-on stretches with the kids. “If I’m not working I’m looking after three boys. They’re my buddies and we meet the world together every day. We bushwalk, we ride bikes, we make stuff. We paint, we draw, we read, write.”
His eldest has even started sharing the stage with his dad during poetry readings recently. Would he give his own children a free pass if they wanted to follow in his creative footsteps? He laughs. “Not unless they do something proper first.”
Coriolanus is at the Neilson Nutshell, Sydney, from June 20 to July 19, and at Arts Centre Melbourne from July 24 to August 10.
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