Julius Caesar (20 page)
Authors: William Shakespeare
Other twenty-first-century productions have chosen to focus on the conspiracy and intrigue as reflective of modern politics. The intimacy of Bristol’s Tobacco Factory allowed Andrew Hilton’s 2009 production to be played in near-whispers, and Jacobean cloaks and hats evoked the famous image of the Gunpowder Plot as a key reference point (a costume decision also taken in 1986 by David Thacker’s production for the Young Vic), yet the powerful Act 4 Scene 1 suggested the callousness of modern bureaucracy as Antony literally signed away his nephew’s life. Toneelgroep Amsterdam’s 2009
Roman Tragedies
more explicitly updated Rome to the anonymous “corridors of power” of modern politics. Here, Renée Fokker’s Cassius was a female politician trying to make her way in a man’s world, and needed the validation of Roeland Fernhout’s Brutus for her coup. Their conflict stemmed from her frustration as Brutus took increasingly more control over “her” plan; but, in this world, all politicians served their own interests. Across languages, cultures, ideologies, and eras,
Julius Caesar
continues to filter commentary on our actions and, more important, on what motivates them.
Not in Our Stars, but in Ourselves …
Julius Caesar
dramatises issues of enduring relevance—government, dictatorship versus democracy, political assassination, civil war—but not as abstract concepts. Shakespeare presents political action in terms of the human personalities engaged in it.
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George Bernard Shaw called
Julius Caesar
“the most splendidly written political melodrama we possess.” In the twentieth century, what
Coleridge “thought of as the impartiality and evenhandedness of Shakespeare’s politics”
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has been replaced by examinations of the effectiveness of the political assassination of recognizable tyrants. From Hitler and Mussolini to Ceauşescu, the face of twentieth-century fascism has never been far from the thoughts of modern directors. Understandable parallels are there to be drawn. As Fran Thompson, designer of David Thacker’s 1993 production at The Other Place, pointed out:
Written by a comparatively young man at a time of enormous political upheaval, it is a visionary piece of writing preempting the English Civil War by almost forty years. Shakespeare’s choice of the story of the assassination of Caesar in 44 BC and the subsequent civil war was a vivid metaphor for the struggle to sustain democracy and protect the Republic against a potential dictatorship.
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Critics remain largely open to modern dressings for the play, aware of its contemporary relevance, but react badly when a definite place or recognizable tyrant is marked in a production. Referring back to Shakespeare’s text, they invariably point out that to equate Caesar with Hitler or Ceauşescu is to remove the essential ambiguity of the conspirators’, and especially Brutus’, decision. The more highly praised productions are those whose settings have been “in no particular time … more of a dream [or should we say, nightmare] of fascism.”
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Brutus’ status as the moral hero of the play has been put into question; Cassius is rarely played now as a Machiavellian villain and Antony’s motivations have also been severely questioned. Using the scope which Shakespeare’s text allows:
More common now is the approach that equalizes the political forces in the play, emphasizing the many sidedness of each of the major participants. This has … to do with an understanding of how Shakespeare’s text actually works. Criticism of the play over the past few decades has increasingly revealed the gaps and inconsistencies in these men, the lack of symmetry
between private feeling and public posture, the very human muddle that affects their politics. And the theatre has adopted a similar view.
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Productions have rarely been able to cope with these modern complexities: “To reveal itself fully, the play requires an uncut text, fluid stagecraft, and actors of heroic power. And these three factors, sadly enough, have never conjoined.”
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They may have never conjoined, but the RSC has undoubtedly produced some interesting and exciting productions of
Julius Caesar
which throw light on the political thought and taste of the eras in which they were produced.
By the 1960s, postwar political optimism had been replaced by a growing wave of cynicism. John Blatchley’s 1963 production was “resolutely un-heroic … the moral status of all three main characters … was diminished as politics was presented as the cynical and self-seeking pursuit of power.”
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Setting the predominant mode of design for the play in the productions that followed, the costumes
pay their tribute to Rome in the toga form of the top dress, but the boots and uniform beneath carry a more universal note. They serve to remind us that tyranny and conspiracy are timeless, as also in their drabs and duns they will remind us that war when it comes is conducted in dirt and dust.
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Blatchley sought to diminish the epic nature of the play and the almost mythical status of the characters: “Throughout he sacrifices the atmosphere of an explosive Rome in order to produce a number of petty men groping about on a vast and empty stage.”
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No heroic shine was placed on Brutus’ motives, and it even hinted at moral cowardice in the assassination scene: “Blatchley also introduced a new conception of the assassination, in which Roy Dotrice as Caesar intentionally threw himself on the sword of Brutus, who was too timid to act.”
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This effective piece of staging was adopted in many less cynical productions that followed. With Caesar initiating the final blow that will end his life, his assassination is echoed later in the play by the
aided suicides of Cassius and Brutus, giving symmetry to Caesar’s revenge:
Contrasts, even contradictions, are perhaps inevitable in a modern production of
Julius Caesar
. Some aspects of the play, such as political assassination or the claims of democracy versus dictatorship, seem to invite a particularly contemporary staging; but other features, such as belief in auguries, the highly rhetorical style, and especially the presentation of Brutus as an embryonic tragic hero, seem to discourage any specifically contemporary emphasis. Ron Daniels’s [1983] production exploited these contrasting elements. In the programme, articles on Roman history and religious beliefs were set against the views of contemporary political figures about “preventative assassination.”
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On the stage, there was much emphasis on the ceremonial aspect of the “holy chase” in which Antony takes part and on the ritual laments for the dead Caesar, yet most of the characters wore identical uniforms vaguely reminiscent of
Star Wars
.
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The conspirators wore different shades of red, symbolizing empire and blood, but also bringing to mind Communist China, or perhaps even the Russian revolution. The contrast between the public and private personas of the characters was given emphasis in this production, which was
best remembered for presenting Caesar’s murder and the major orations in black-and-white, documentary style, on a large television screen lowered to mid-stage. This innovation, intended to highlight the contradictions between public image and private personality in contemporary society, was generally derided as gimmickry by critics and was discontinued later in the season.
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However, this was just one element in which Daniels’s use of scale and perspective effectively delineated the events and themes of the play:
Clad in scarlet and gold, [Caesar] and his companions form a line from one side of the stage to the other and advance majestically towards the audience while the organ of Coventry Cathedral blares out in triumphant tones. It is an image from
The Will to Power
,
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or might be. Riefenstahl’s film often used to be cited as an example of the power of the image to persuade the feelings against all sense … The vulgarities of music and design (largely crimson, gold and silver in the first half of the production and very much in the spirit of the Nuremberg rallies) might be intended as a commentary on imperial pretension—do we not have a quotation from Marx in the place of honour in the programme?—but first and foremost they strike one as simply vulgar … There is a complete change of décor for the second half of the play. We are now in
Mother Courage
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country, shaggy black carpet underfoot, darkness at the back of the stage, grappling nets hanging from above, and soon, among the half-Roman, half-Hundred Years War military, Mother Courage’s cart itself appears, only here it has to serve largely as the body of Brutus’s tent. After the pretensions of the first half, men are cut down to size on the battlefield.
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Terry Hands is a director keen to remove the political from his productions. In 1987 his production focused on the influence of power in a male-dominated society. He stripped down the stage, using only a textured brick wall onto which images could be projected and effects created with inventive lighting:
Hands, who likes to light his own shows, creates wonders here. The prodigies of the fatal night conjure up fantastic shapes against the flaring colours of the brick. Shadows mysteriously emerge as from Hades while beams of light spot each of the conspirators in turn.
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His lighting in
Julius Caesar
is sculptural. It subtly alters the texture and surfaces and manipulates space like a shaping force. This is important, because it underlines what seems to me Hands’s main insight into the play. Its first half is mostly bathed in the cold light of public politics. Caesar (David Waller) is an insufferable conviction politician who thrives on exposure. His is a harsh, imperious world: the space is defined by brutal columns of white light which might have been designed by Albert Speer.
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3.
Terry Hands’s production in 1987 had a stripped-down stage and instead used lighting sculpturally. His was “a harsh, imperious world: the space is defined by brutal columns of white light.”
Clearly, there’s no alternative to Caesar, and the senators conspire in private darkness; at the end, Brutus and Cassius are isolated in black spaces of error, terror and division pierced by sinister shafts of purple light.
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David Thacker’s 1993 production at The Other Place was the first RSC production of
Julius Caesar
to dispense with Roman dress. He set his play in a very recognizable European world of late twentieth-century conflict:
1989 was a time of huge change in eastern European society. As a revolutionary play
Julius Caesar
sits happily in revolutionary
times. We felt that the political schism in the Eastern Bloc which is so fresh in our minds would give the production dynamism and contemporary relevance … We agreed there was little to be gained from squeezing the play into a specifically Romanian, Russian or Czechoslovakian setting or by saying that Caesar is Gorbachev, Ceauşescu, Honecker. We were not wanting to create direct or specific parallels but rather to draw on the power of contemporary political change in order to demonstrate the seriousness and relevance of the issues addressed in the play. To be non-specific about a setting is not to be evasive or indecisive but to allow members of the audience to make other associations of dictatorship and the struggle for democracy for instance in South Africa or Latin America.
The potency of modern dress cannot be underestimated for an audience which might find Shakespeare’s verse alienating. Images of suited politicians and uniformed generals in contrast to a poorly dressed crowd have the immediacy and apparent veracity of a news story on television. The struggle for democracy encapsulated in
Julius Caesar
is sadly still going on.
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In order to hit home the contemporary experience and make the audience more directly involved with the action of the play, Thacker decided to stage the play as a promenade production. The audience stood around the actors, witnesses to the action at close proximity. One reviewer commented:
To find yourself standing a mere yard from the assassins as they roll up their shirt-sleeves and bathe their arms in Caesar’s blood is as nicely horrid as you can imagine.
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In an interview for the
Independent
, Thacker explained his choice:
This is a play about people manipulating or dealing with crowds … I thought it would be theatrically exciting to have people there on stage so they experience being in a large group of people hearing the speeches. I hope it might make them think “Would I believe this?” in a more concrete way than usual.
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