Julius Caesar (23 page)

Did you opt for an ancient setting or something to suggest more modern parallels?

Hall:
My production had a more contemporary setting. It had an aura of fascism about it. I took the slogan “Peace, Freedom and Liberty,” which is one of the slogans which comes up in the play, as the party’s slogan: that’s what Caesar stood for. We had a huge neon sign at the back that lit up during the opening procession and the climax saying “Peace, Freedom and Liberty.” There were dark uniforms and jackboots, but over the top of that there was the stencil of ancient Rome: people wore rather elegant togas so you could still feel the classical world on stage.

Farr:
We had a strong modern setting. We had a clear idea in our heads, which we didn’t need the audience to fully understand in order to experience the story, but which we essentially created in our heads: a modern nation state in which a Putin-like leader was doing exactly this, was attempting to extend his role into a long-term presidential role. At the time we were doing it Putin was considering changing the constitution from a five-year presidential reign to a ten-year one. He didn’t do it in the end, but he was considering it and we were inspired by that. So we used a modern language and we explored the idea of a theater company invading an existing government space, a factory I suppose, in order to present a kind of guerrilla underground version of this play as a mode of protest. There was a whole Brechtian guerrilla theater quality. The audience weren’t in on that and we didn’t try and make it overt, it was a way in which to make the story clear and feel urgent and immediate. It is a short play and it has got an intense pace about it; it doesn’t have as much eccentricity as some of Shakespeare’s other plays, it just does exactly what is intended, like a thriller. I was making it for the regional tour and I had a strong desire to make it for what I perceived to be a young audience, or an audience that was new to Shakespeare, and I felt it was important to make, in a sophisticated way, the work feel urgent and contemporary.

6.
Edward Hall’s contemporary setting, RSC 2001–02: “We had a huge neon sign at the back which lit up during the opening procession and the climax saying ‘Peace, Freedom and Liberty.’ There were dark uniforms and jackboots but over the top of that there was the stencil of ancient Rome.”

Bailey
: I was immediately drawn to the primal brutal world that Shakespeare depicts in this play, but at the same time very conscious of its contemporary resonance. It describes a world where the decisions of a few powerful men affect the lives of hundreds and thousands—where the repercussions of these decisions end up in mass slaughter. It couldn’t be more relevant today. The belief system of this world is pre-Christian, based on the amoral activities of the gods dictated by signs and portents. A world of stunning creativity and unbelievable cruelty—and not so far from our post-Christian world, which has returned to an excessive and similar obsession with sex and violence.

Working with my designer Bill Dudley, our first instinct was to avoid any architectural representation of Rome on stage. We wanted
to capture the atmosphere of violence and panic that is the backdrop to the play—and is the climate in which the assassination takes place. This led us to the use of film to suggest a Rome full of frightened people—an irrational, unstable world governed by portents and dreams. Our set was incredibly simple to look at, but hard to realize. A series of six gauzes which could move in parallel to each other, creating entrances between them or becoming one flat backdrop. Onto these gauzes we projected images of our cast duplicated to become a massive crowd. These films would echo the action on stage, lending every scene in the first half a sense of frenetic movement and panic, and in the second half capturing the vast military campaign.

Do audiences need to be familiar with the backstory/events leading up to the play before it begins?

Hall:
No, I don’t think an audience should ever need to be familiar with any of that. I think it’s our job to deliver the play in such a way that somebody can walk in from a heavy day’s work, collapse in a seat, look up and get taken on a journey where they don’t have to have swallowed a book or a dictionary to understand what is going on.

Bailey:
It’s a brilliantly written political thriller—a real page-turner. The play starts mid-crisis, at fever pitch and continues at that pace, never letting up. Shakespeare is brilliant at encapsulating what has gone on before with an amazing brevity and speed. I think the challenge to the stage director is to tell the story in a way that illuminates the text. All the information you need is there in Shakespeare’s words, so it’s up to the production to excavate it. In the opening scene the Tribunes berate the crowd for forgetting their loyalty to their beloved Pompey, and cheering Caesar who destroyed him. I chose to extend the opening, fleshing out what Shakespeare has cleverly depicted in words with a more visceral stage picture. The Lupercal is a fertility festival and has its roots in the legend of Romulus and Remus and the violent birth of Rome. It is being celebrated in Rome on the same day as Caesar’s triumph. Caesar knows his victory over Pompey’s sons is extremely unpopular so he cannily turns it into a popular triumph by hijacking the Lupercal Carnival. This is implied
rather than stated by Shakespeare. So we staged an amazing Bacchanalian and violent Lupercal with the wolfmen whipping women and segued deftly into Caesar’s magnificent triumph, the same confetti and madness in the air as affected the carnival, underlining the political maneuvering of this ruthless man.

Farr:
Not at all. There are two things which you have to make clear. One is the notion of what a Lupercal holiday is—that is a difficult thing—and more important and equally difficult, because it is only related and not shown on stage, is the ceremony of the turning down of the crown: something that can be difficult for an audience to fully grasp. But once those two things are grasped, and if you can clarify exactly what they mean in your production, then the piece becomes crystal clear after that. Interestingly, I found in a contemporary setting the second half to be much easier, because I felt the whole notion of it breaking into civil war and the modernity of warfare very familiar. In the negotiating scene which goes wrong in the second half we used United Nations language, and suddenly the whole thing became alive and I found what everyone says is difficult about the play in the second half to be extremely rewarding.

What I found more difficult were Lupercalian celebrations and the sort of astrological chaos of the first few scenes, where they are talking about lions and that whole more cosmic Roman area. We explored that in a psyche-of-the-country kind of way and that worked to an extent, but as always with Shakespeare he was writing historical plays for his time. The difficulty this creates when directing is the overwhelming impulse to make it immediate for our time, but of course Shakespeare didn’t write for our time, he wrote for his time and so there is always a tension—a very interesting tension—that you do not want to just sit them back in the period, because he wasn’t interested in that. But at the same time, if you modernize thoughtlessly you are going to come a cropper, because he wasn’t writing for the year 2000.

And what about the specifically Roman stuff, such as Brutus adhering to the Stoic philosophy and Cassius to the Epicurean? Shakespeare must have expected most of his audience to know
what he was talking about, but most of our audiences don’t have a clue, not having studied classics in school as every educated male did in Shakespeare’s time
.

Hall:
I don’t think that’s true. I think the majority of Shakespeare’s audience had no idea what these forms of rhetoric or belief were: most of the people who watched his plays were illiterate. The small amount of people who usually paid for the writing and performing of the plays would have understood that, but where Shakespeare is so brilliant is that you do not have to know any of these things to appreciate that one man is a jealous bear looking for revenge, and another man is torn so terribly because he has the ultimate liberal intellect and he understands every single angle of an argument. In a way that is Brutus’s curse. Stoicism can be confused with feeling relaxed about everything, and it’s not, and I think it drives Brutus into such a knot that his wife famously mutilates herself because she can’t bear the tension that he seems to be under. I don’t think you have to know anything about Stoicism or Epicureanism or any of those things to understand that. I think it’s an interesting sideline if you want to study more and I think it’s great for academics to expostulate on, but fundamentally it’s not something that drove us in the rehearsal room. What Shakespeare has written is a very strong, defined character and the lines and the action are an expression of his character and not of an intellectual idea. It may be that when you look back on it you say Brutus is a Stoic. But Brutus wouldn’t necessarily say he was a Stoic, and you don’t need to understand what Stoicism is to play Brutus. In fact it can be a hindrance that overtakes the role.

Farr:
But that translates beautifully into modern ideas of pacifism and activism. Those ideas are timeless. The language in which they are couched might be unfamiliar, but you are not trying to give the audience a lesson in stoic philosophy and the ideas are crystal clear: the notion of patient acceptance of faith against those notions of fighting faith, and self-determination. Cassius is a phenomenally modern character. Brutus is difficult because he is a less modern character, but I look at someone like Barack Obama and think in a funny way Brutus is coming back in: the emphasis on moral center, on rhetoric, has actually returned after a period in which I feel politics
was very much about delivery and about making the correct decision under pressure, and not really about ideology and morality. We seem now to be returning to these areas, so that debate is still alive now. I found the debate between Cassius and Brutus to be particularly sensitive: the most alive material that we dealt with.

How did you stage the assassination itself?

Hall:
One of the big problems with the play is blood: there’s an awful lot of it and once it gets on the stage, from a practical point of view it gets very sticky. And I wanted a lot of blood. There’s blood on people’s hands, they talk about the blood and how you can smell it; it’s very, very important, especially for what happens afterward. I had Caesar in his chair and there was a very white, perspex sheet that the chair was on that went up the back of the RST and up into the fly floor with a picture of Caesar on it. It was like a beautiful big piece of scenery, but when he was murdered we could chuck blood all over it, because we then dropped it from the fly floor and dragged it off stage and all the blood was gone when we wanted it to be. It was very violent and very bloody and you saw that he ended up being stabbed again and again and again, and everybody had to have a hand in it. It was violent, sodden, and very bloody.

Farr:
The murder was brutal and dirty and messy and, very much because of the costumes, the men in suits, and the sense that Caesar was clearly conducting some kind of high-level cabinet meeting, it felt political and it took place in real life. I was looking for a level of ritual as well, when they dip their hands in the blood of Caesar. The blood was not naturalistic because the whole play was not presented in that naturalistic way: there was a bucket of blood brought on and there was a strange ritualistic quality to that which counterpointed the more grubby realism of the actual killing. Because there was so much blood people could dip their hands in, and this emphasized the sacrificial quality of the killing, which was very effective.

Bailey:
Our one piece of physical set was the plinth that Caesar ascends just before his assassination. It looked like a slab of marble fit for slaughter. Our idea was that the assassins would appear like
wolves from the dark and leap onto the plinth. Caesar fights back with amazing ferocity. Greg Hicks, who acted Caesar, made this moment very believable—being lithe and athletic. The grand historical assassination that the conspirators imagined degenerates into frantic butchery. Brutus waits for an opportunity to kill him in a memorable and meaningful way, but finally scrabbles up the steps, pushing the manic killers aside, and grabs the body from them. The moment is not heroic, just ghastly.

How, with a limited number of actors, did you go about creating the mob scenes?

Hall:
We put the actors all over the theater. I personally can’t imagine that scene being done any other way than using your audience as the crowd, and I am sure that’s what would have happened when Shakespeare did it; several hundred people hopefully (unless it’s a Tuesday matinee!), and you get them for free. So we had actors out in the audience at different points shouting and jeering. The audience weren’t invited to join in—because why would they?—but they certainly enabled the rebels and Antony to directly address the audience with the corpse of Caesar, and talk to those various different actors dotted around the building. They were positioned up in the gallery and would shout down at the stage. They had iron bars, which they banged on bits of the auditorium—I think we damaged the poor old RST at some point—and then we had one of the crowd come in on a rope and abseil down from the balcony into the stalls as the mob made their way onto stage. It was a scene that we played directly out to the audience.