Julius Caesar (again)

by William Shakespeare

seen at the Bridge Theatre on 27 March 2018

Having so much enjoyed Nicholas Hytner's modern dress production of this play in January from a gallery seat, I decided that I just had to see it again as a promenader, milling about in the central acting area and being moved hither and yon by the stage crew (fully accoutred with headsets and security vests) as the demands of the staging required different rostra to be raised and lowered.

I'm extremely glad that I went again to see the play from this more involved perspective. Not only was it an excellent opportunity to see the actors from a closer position; it was also exciting to realise how cleverly the play had been streamlined for an uninterrupted two-hour running time, and to appreciate the logistical brilliance of the whole enterprise. 

The cast were even more impressive at close quarters - the intense intellectualism of Ben Whishaw's Brutus, the steely determination of Michelle Fairley's Cassius, the passionate energy of David Morissey's Mark Antony, were all powerfully rendered, while the crowd scenes were wonderfully managed so that we promenaders were part of the action but rarely required actually to do anything so vital that our inexperience would imperil the result. By this I mean that, for example, the crowd's cheering as Caesar progressed was almost entirely pre-recorded, so that our contributions (if made at all) supplemented the effect but did not create it. The most definite thing required of us, apart from keeping out of the way of the rostra and the stage crew's manipulation of furniture, was to crouch down in self-protection in the aftermath of the assassination, just as a crowd would be ordered to with the threat of armed assassins whose program was unknown. Where individual members of the crowd were needed to call out or to react specifically to the major characters, members of the cast were always on hand amongst us to deliver the goods.

It's a great production well worth its second view.