Go. This production gives the spectator a chance to witness the power of Shakespeare in unique new ways, and, as with all productions which align themselves to serve his talent, Shakespeare emerges as the glittering star of the evening. Some of Bertold Brecht's adaptation is in there somewhere, in the simplified language of the citizens.

This was my second Shakespeare of the week. As with the Wooster Group's foray into 'Troilus and Cressida', there was a serious attempt to create a new avenue of articulation into the depths of a great text. With the use of headphones, and a dual-screen black and white projection we are allowed access to an event on different levels, each of them finely delivered. The event happens around or amongst the audience, the choice is yours as you decide where to situate yourself, bound only by your sense of fairness in allowing a field of view to fellow audience members. Any inconvenience you may care to feel in having to wear headphones is quashed by the proximity they bring to the words of this play, because the text is, for once, liberated from the need for projection into the volume of a large space.

Amongst many other things, Coriolanus is a debate about the nature of government, and this can be editorially swayed in many directions by a director's conception. Mercifully, and cleverly, this production is contrived to exist, only, in the world populated by  the audience that walks through the door at the beginning. Craft and style have been employed to construct a situation that we are tempted to assume we are part of, and the result is that we are made to see that politics is carried out by similar humans, with similar human dispositions. As a case for having to acknowledge that circumstances can decree that it is our fate to be led by people we don't necessarily like, I had a refreshed vision of the extent to which politics in this country is a battle of brands as willfully contrived as Haagen Dasz, Colonel Sanders or Orange.

A sense of common identity is reinforced by the fact that the actors are wearing headsets too. Their's are more discreet and, with them, their words are rendered with exacting clarity without any compromise to pace or to the naturalistic guise of the production. The production creates a powerful sense of an endangered society seeking desperate remedies; the impetus is relentless and the result engrossing. Contemptuously snobbish to the core, we come to admire Coriolanus for his ruthless honesty amongst the strata of authority desperately trying to figure out what to say. As the axis of this play, Richard Lynch portrays a convincingly necessary evil, a warrior and a man whose status as a Patrician is not dependent on his attire. 

Along with the rest of the cast, he is sparing with his moments of intense action, making them more indelible when they arrive. For the cast relish and trust the words that they say, both in the fact that they will bear  the flow of the play without undue emphasis, that they carry considerable poetic force, and that they will arrive at our ears by the miracle of radio.

Mike Pearson and Mike Brooks' production is a masterpiece of conception and execution. It brings us scientifically closer to that precious list of words that is a Shakespeare play. Out of a big, cold space, with  some industrial plant and a few vehicles and after careful technical preparations, a timelessly relevant essay on people and power comes singing across.

If actors of this quality are available in Wales and can produce an experience of this quality, then the question is begged: why is there not a production of Shakespeare here every month? 

Do the people not deserve it?