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JUDI DENCH:
Reflections - 'Coriolanus' - 1992:

" ... it will be lovely to get back to the acting."

And so she did. After two directorial positions with the Renaissance Theatre Company, Dame Judi Dench appeared in the RTC's 1992 production of 'Coriolanus' as Volumnia, mother of Coriolanus, opposite Kenneth Branagh.

I played Kenneth Branagh's mother when we did 'Coriolanus' at the Chichester Festival Theatre ... It's a very difficult play and we were in a very difficult space. I remember Ken and Iain Glen, who [played] Aufidius, alone in the middle of the vast thrust stage ... still managing to bump into to one other. Much of the production, which Tim Supple directed, worked well, and we had a very large, very disciplined crowd of extras, but having not seen it [before] I only have the view from Volumnia, which consists of a number of fiendishly hard scenes. Some of it I never felt I got right. I'm sure something has been destroyed in her by the end. When she returns to Rome after persuading Coriolanus not to attack the city, she knows exactly what is going to happen ... there's a death in her. She simply walks across the stage, without a hint of triumph. In a way, she has sold out. She feels that what she does is right; ... but even when Coriolanus says,

O mother, mother!
What have you done? Behold, the heavens do ope,
The gods look down, and this unnatural scene
They laugh at. O my mother, mother! O!
You have won a happy victory to Rome;
But for your son, -- believe it, O, believe it,
Most dangerously you have with him prevail'd
If not most mortal to him. . . .

she doesn't know the consequences. She realizes what they are later. Volumnia is quite capable of lying, earlier in the scene, when she tells Coriolanus,

Thou hast never in thy life
Show'd thy dear mother any courtesy.

It shows too in the scene where they are persuading him to go back to the people 'mildly.' She resents not having him under her thumb. She is a very good ruler, who would have been totally ruthless ... but it costs her at the end.