Julius Caesar: the recent production by Bell Shakespeare
Company reviewed by Frances Dharmalingham.
A small group of Shakespeare
Club members attended a performance of Julius
Caesar at the Heath Ledger Theatre.
The first part of the play,
with its glimpses of Caesar’s disturbing ambition and the plotters’ reasons to
assassinate him, is challenging because it necessarily involves much talking: a
consideration of political ideas, mingled with very personal feelings,
particularly in the long dialogue between Cassius and Brutus. Cassius, played
by Nick Simpson-Deeks, spoke with admirable clarity as he presented his
arguments, but his slow delivery reduced the urgency of the situation. The
actor was perhaps aware of possible school audiences: they would certainly have
been able to note all the important steps in Cassius’s argument. For most of
the scene, he and Brutus were standing too far apart, on opposite sides of the
wide stage, which limited the required intensity and intimacy of the
conspiracy. Brutus (Ivan Donato) established immediately his sleep-deprived
confusion and desperate worry, but engaged in irritatingly repetitive, and therefore
distracting, gestures. His speech was frequently muffled.
Caesar was played by Kenneth
Ransom. His gestures were suitably imperious, and his commanding height was an
advantage: his voice, however, lacked the depth and resonance which would have
imbued his speech with a more convincing authority.
The central part of the play,
showing the events of the Ides of March, was engrossing and powerful. The
actual murder of Caesar was skilfully choreographed, almost in slow motion, as
one by one the senators took their turns to stab him and he finally faced
Brutus for the death blow. The actors sustained the tension well as their
characters came to terms with what they had done. I had some difficulty,
however, with the use of a bucket for ‘let us bathe our hands in Caesar’s blood’
and later, when Mark Antony presented the bucket to the crowd as Caesar’s
remains.
The exchanges between Brutus,
Cassius and Antony effectively revealed the differences in their characters,
which became even clearer in the great speeches to the people. It was a
surprise that the interval fell between Brutus’s and Antony’s speeches; we were
all waiting in keen anticipation for Antony’s riposte, and suddenly we had to
wait a lot longer! I wondered at the time whether this was a good idea, but it
certainly was. Mark Antony burst back on the scene after the interval, and gave
an absolutely masterly display of subtle oratory. Brutus had adopted a somewhat
defensive defiance when he addressed the crowd; it was fortunate that Antony
did not immediately follow him, as it would have seemed that he had little to
do to win the people’s favour over to his side.
Throughout the play Mark
Antony was outstanding. Sara Zwangobani’s emotional range, vocal control, and
clarity of diction allowed her to reveal every aspect of Antony’s character. As
well as the great speech to the people, Antony’s lamentation over Caesar’s corpse
was deeply affecting, and built to a finale of powerful ferocity. The actor
displayed fine judgement in handling the modulations of mood following this,
with the character immediately turning to war business, planning to contact
Octavius.
The third section of the
play, the aftermath of all that happens on the Ides of March, can sometimes
seem confused and a little disappointing after such dramatic action. Our little
group from the club all agreed that the entire second half of the performance
was much more engrossing than the first.
I had only one quibble. I
have always felt that the most dreadful death in the whole play is that of
Cinna the poet, murdered for no reason but that he shares the same name as a
conspirator. This follows immediately after Antony’s stirring up of the
plebeians, and serves to illustrate both his prophecy that Caesar’s spirit will
“cry Havoc” and his warning to Octavius that “here is a mourning Rome, a dangerous
Rome, no Rome of safety…” and the scene illustrates all the horror accompanying
the loss of civil order and the breakdown of the rule of law.
Several valuable minutes were
taken up in creating a set for homeless street-dwellers, with numbers of
mattresses (brand-new and difficult to manage!) and other accessories, before
the action could begin. This broke the momentum built in the preceding scene,
and detracted from the shock of the murder, for me. The set really was
unnecessary, since it was immediately (and again, obtrusively) dismantled,
causing needless distraction and delay again.
From that point on, however,
things moved fast and we had a very fine quarrel scene between Cassius and Brutus.
Here there was the necessary fire and energy accompanied by clear communication
of the ideas and feelings of the characters. Brutus handled the sudden change
of mood with most convincing laughter, and the transition to the sad news of
Portia’s death was genuinely touching.
The appearance of Caesar’s
ghost was suitably ethereal, but the device (? a microphone?) used to make his
speech more supernatural unfortunately made it difficult to understand his
words. This became a greater problem when the ghost returned in the last scene,
and replaced the several characters who are usually asked by Brutus to hold his
sword, for his suicide. This might have been justified by reference to Brutus’s
earlier exclamation after Cassius’s death: ‘O Julius Caesar, thou art mighty
yet, Thy spirit walks abroad and turns our swords In our own proper entrails.’ However
I was doubtful about the wisdom of taking the words so literally as to have
Caesar actually physically stabbing Brutus.
It was noteworthy that,
bearing in mind the requirements of gender equality, the cast consisted of even
numbers of men and women. This required all but one woman to play some male
roles. Interestingly, the characters all retained their male names as given by
Shakespeare, but (since they were dressed as women, and clearly being played by,
and as, women) they were referred to with feminine pronouns. This took some
getting used to! I sympathise with any female actor’s wish to play any part in
the play, and we have to admit that most of the best Shakespearean roles are
for men, but I believe that the performers should attempt to act the parts as
written: i.e. to present the characters as men, seriously, just as the young
male actors of the sixteenth century would have approached their roles as
women. I am sure there must be many different points of view on this subject.
The play’s setting was
non-specific: the strange but adaptable construction which served as the set
effectively suggested the back veranda of Brutus’s house, the steps of the
Forum, the mountains of the battlefield, and so on. The costumes were mainly
jeans and trainers, making it at times difficult to distinguish between
characters. There was some attempt to separate the patricians from the
plebeians, with Calpurnia, Octavius and Antony wearing more “fashionable”
clothes than most of the others. As to the period in which these events might
have been happening: I thought perhaps it was a few decades in the future. The
sound design was interesting, using discordant music at times to heighten the
drama, though sometimes at the risk of drowning the speech. Instead of vocal
shouts of the crowd during the long speeches, these unidentifiable noises
filled the pauses and created a clever impression of the sometimes inhuman
nature of a large and unpredictable horde. The lighting was well used to focus
on the action at any given point, leaving large areas of the stage only dimly
visible; this helped the small cast to create the illusion of much greater
numbers of characters, just out of sight.
Although the performance was
uneven, both in terms of the actors’ skills, and the extent of the audience’s
engagement in various scenes, I was left with much to think about. It certainly
made me return to the script of this great play, and appreciate it all over
again.
