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.

The two major conspirators, Cassius and Brutus, are well delineated. Martin Hutson is intense and consequently both persuasive and too easily crossed. His deference towards Brutus is perhaps borne of genuine respect at first, but it becomes a millstone as he gradually realises that Brutus makes disastrous decisions and cannot be talked out of them; one senses his uneasy awareness that it is impossible for him to break the habit once Brutus has taken advantage of it. The trajectory of Cassius, from self-confidence to unwilling acquiescence, is finely observed, and the great quarrel scene between the two leaders in the second half shows the diminution of his influence.

Alex Waldmann presents a warm and thoughtful Brutus, unaware of his real inadequacies while luxuriating in the dilemmas his family reputation has bequeathed to him. While constantly taking the moral high ground, he seems unconsciously to be adopting the demeanour of Caesar himself, trying out the body language while appearing to shrug it off - a very interesting idea to offset the sympathetic thoughtfulness of his more personal interactions (for example with his servant boy). This almost naive self-centeredness accounts, perhaps, for his hard-won impassivity over the news of his wife's death, a stance utterly antipathetic to modern sensibilities but nonetheless a valid one at the time. 

Opposing these two, James Corrigan's Antony is charismatic, young and vigorous, delivering the famous funeral oration with wonderful energy and confidence - the crowd scenes in this production are particularly impressive, not least because the crowd seems respectably large, and its shifting loyalties completely convincing; but this Antony certainly knows how to play them. In contrast, the young Octavius, so soon to be a dangerous rival, seems in the hands of Jon Tarcy not to be sufficiently strong - the voice perhaps too strained.

The assassination is gruesome enough, though perhaps not staged quite as Antony later describes it (derived from Plutarch's account): Caesar did not here muffle his face with his cloak when Brutus stabbed him, which is a sign that he ceased to struggle, so the extremely personal sense of Brutus's betrayal was not made entirely clear from Caesar's perspective, though it is true that Brutus's clutching of the body showed how much distress he was in. 

Elsewhere the violence of the play was somewhat muted - the lynching of Cinna the poet was distinctly unbloody and seemed to be managed with rubber truncheons, while the battlefield fights were rather too balletic and the suicides conventionally efficient. The one action which drew a truly shocked gasp from the audience was the brutal dispatch of the servant boy Lucius, when a soldier casually broke his neck - a detail completely absent from the play text. This was a (rightly) jarring reminder of the true ghastliness of civil - or indeed any military - conflict, but ran the risk of reducing the rest of the mayhem to a certain stageyness.