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.

The new Bridge Theatre has a flexible acting space. Where Young Marx (its previous production) was presented on a conventional stage at one end of the auditorium, Julius Caesar is in the round, the entire 'stalls' seats having been removed, and more gallery seats provided at the end where the stage previously was. A couple of hundred members of the audience had standing tickets to be effectively co-opted as the Roman mob; prior to the start of the play they (and the seated audience members) were treated to a raucous rock concert, apparently part of a public entertainment sponsored by the Julius Caesar publicity machine - lots of banners, t-shirts and campaign caps being hawked while the music filled the auditorium.

Somehow the play got going from this potentially distracting start - the tribunes convincingly interrupted the concert - one of the musicians was the sarcastic 'cobbler' - and a phalanx of security crew began the evening's work of shepherding the standing audience into position to allow clear gangways for the important political figures to process through the Forum, or to make their way to various more intimate domestic or public spaces. The sense of politics as theatrical spectacle was thrillingly emphasised by these manoeuvres. The audience was audience, attentive and quiet, during most scenes, but when crowds were needed, there they were, augmented by a soundtrack of much larger bodies cheering - a very clever use of the physical dynamics encouraged by this staging.

Crowd control was rendered even more necessary by the mechanics of Bunny Christie's inventive design. Almost all the scenes were played out on raised platforms, often with significant pieces of furniture - sofas, working desks, thrones, and later, campaigning gear. These platforms rose in various parts of the pit space, and so the groundlings had constantly to be moved out of the way, more and more becoming a milling crowd of witnesses to the unravelling chaos of the action. Full marks to their willing participation in all of this, and to the stage crew who so expertly managed them!

Several of the conspirators - most notably the leader Cassius - were played by women, but in the modern milieu imagined here, this was entirely plausible, with pronouns suitably adjusted. Daggers were replaced by pistols, so the assassination was less immediately physical, but nonetheless theatrically dramatic, while the later deaths and suicides made the characters fall like inanimate rag dolls when each coup de grace was signalled by a booming shot.

What was so impressive about all this, is that the performances of the actors shone a strong and clear light on the great political and personal issues embodied in this play. David Calder's Caesar was both remote and autocratic, and also vain and physically weak, while David Morissey's Antony was a powerful presence showing consummate skill in rabble-rousing when the occasion demanded. Faced with this level of stage charisma, Brutus and Cassius can be less compelling, but here the misguided self assurance of Ben Whishaw's Brutus and the forceful perceptiveness of Michelle Fairley's Cassius provided a convincing dramatic balance. The tensions between them, masked at the beginning while Cassius is so intent on recruiting Brutus to the cause, were superbly revealed by the quarrel scene at the army camp, and although the play was considerably cut to achieve a two-hour running time (with no interval), the fateful muddle and cross-purposes of the conspirators was all the more plain. Portia suffered most from the cuts, her second scene being entirely omitted, and many minor characters were sensibly conflated, but the overall effect was if anything strengthened by this approach.

The resonances with the current political situation were inevitably plainer in this modern dress and modern style - guns and army fatigues, populism pandered to with slogans blazoned on clothing and banners are all too familiar nowadays - but the sheer energy of the production, and the skill of the cast in speaking the often familiar but still now old-fashioned rhetoric of the text, served to remind us of how powerfully relevant Shakespeare's dramas can be.