Julius Caesar

by William Shakespeare

seen at the Bridge Theatre on 27 January 2018

Nicholas Hytner directs Ben Whishaw as Brutus, Michelle Fairley as Cassius, David Morissey as Mark Antony and David Calder as Julius Caesar in a modern dress production designed by Bunny Christie.

It was a risk to attend two productions of the same play within three weeks, especially a play which runs the risk of being comparatively flat in its second half - all too often the machinations of the civil war unleashed by Caesar's death fail to match the power of the assassination plot and Mark Antony's great funeral oration. However, the risk was more than justified - this production is so different from the RSC's, and so exciting in its own terms, that there was no fatigue in watching it.

Belleville

by Amy Herzog

seen at the Donmar Warehouse on 25 January 2018

Michael Longhurst directs Imogen Poots as Abby, James Norton as Zack, Malachi Kirby as Alioune and Faith Alabi as Amina in this one-act ply from 2011, receiving its first London production.

Zack and Abby are a young American couple renting a flat in Belleville, a suburb of Paris. Alioune, the landlord, and his wife Amina live downstairs with their two young children. The flat is not exactly seedy, but it is rather down at heel, and untidy. 

The Twilight Zone

devised by Anne Washburn from the TV series

seen at the Almeida Theatre on 20 Jauary 2018

Richard Jones directs a cast of ten in a clever adaptation of eight stories from the cult TV series The Twilight Zone (1959-64), with the set designed by Paul Steinberg and the costumes by Nicky Gillibrand. The actors play multiple parts in the stories, which are interwoven rather than being depicted consecutively, giving an added distancing effect to the already uncanny and often disturbing individual stories.

The original series consisted of independent dramas aimed at destabilising comfortable assumptions about the ways of the world, either through the irruption of the paranormal, or through alien invasions or other science-fiction motifs. This play opens with a classic gambit, travellers stranded in a bar due to a snow storm, with rumours of something uncanny, other than the storm, having occurred nearby. The twist is that the bus driver distinctly remembers that he six passengers originally boarded the bus, but there are seven stranded people in the bar - so one of them must be an alien. There follows a predictable series of arguments and defensive ploys as everyone bickers about what could be going on. The denouement is withheld until after several other stories have got underway, but it has a neat twist of its own.

Antony and Cleopatra

by William Shakespeare

seen at the Barbican Theatre on 6 January 2018

Part of the RSC's Rome MMXVII season, this play is directed by Iqbal Khan and features Josette Simon as Cleopatra, Antony Byrne as Mark Antony, Ben Allen as Octavius Caesar and Andre Woodall as Enobarbus. It is interesting, but in the event justified, that the characters common to both Julius Caesar and Antony and Cleopatra - namely, Antony himself and the other triumvirs Octavius and Lepidus - are played by different actors in the two productions, though many of the supporting cast appear in both.

Robert Innes Hopkins designed both productions, giving a sense of visual unity while expanding the palette, as it were, to include the Egyptian scenes, their general sensuousness signified by a large draped curtain to offset the sterner vertical and horizontal lines of Rome, and the occasional appearance of large cat statues. But, with a different director, even if the visual presentation was broadly related, the overall approach was inevitably different, most notably in the sound world in which the brass and percussion of the earlier play are here supplemented by (electric) guitar and saxaphone. 

Julius Caesar

by William Shakespeare

seen at the Barbican Theatre on 6 January 2018

Part of the RSC's Rome MMXVII season, this play is directed by Angus Jackson and features Alex Waldmann as Brutus, Martin Hutson as Cassius, Andrew Woodall as Julius Caesar, James Corrigan as Mark Antony and Jon Tarcy as Octavius Caesar.

The setting is notionally Classical (columns, and a foreboding statue of a lion mauling a horse, feature at the back of the stage in the first half, rather than any realistic evocation of sites such as the theatre of Pompey where Caesar's assassination actually took place; rough indications of open landscape for the second half - designer Robert Innes Hopkins); the costumes also feature togas and tunics, but also very un-Roman red calf-length trousers.

This helps establish the historical background, and allows for very fine visual effects when, for example, the conspirators move from being a group of symmetrically placed almost-statues to a mob of baying assassins. It also gives added effect to Julius Caesar's stately arrogance, while allowing us to see the human frailty it is meant to conceal (a certain elderly deafness as well as hints of the epilepsy referred to by Cassius). Andrew Woodall shows us the arrogance of the man who evidently will not need much more persuading to become a king.