Ursula Strauss
posted 6 May 2005

Julius Caesar - not a play put on very frequently these days. To contemporary tastes, it seems more than usually heavy-handed. When it sounds good the first time, Shakespeare repeats it another six, and bog-standard Elizabethan tropes such as angry landscape/animals behaving unnaturally equals portents of doom seem particularly laborious here.

And yet, as always with Shakespeare, the moments of genius are electrifying, such as Mark Antony's (Ralph Fiennes) sly speech that turns the crowd against the idealistic and naïve Brutus (Anton Lesser) and the drama of Caesar's disregard of the auguries. Deborah Warner's interpretation splits the play into two halves, stylistically as well as literally. The first half has a classical air, both in terms of the approach by the actors and visually, as when the senators are arrayed on the steps of the senate, move to circling around Caesar and then clasp bloody hands and disperse again.

The introduction of a much-commented upon baying mob of a hundred extras (not, apparently, a new idea, a similar approach was used in a German production of 1881 and others) serve to demarcate the action almost in the way of a Greek chorus, giving the first half the whiff of a Greek tragedy. As Antony makes his speech, the crowd comes out from behind the carefully erected barriers and it is a short step from here to the murder of Cinna the poet (touchingly played by Leo Wringer) and the beginnings of chaos. Strikingly, the curtain comes down leaving half of Cinna's body lying outside, forcing the audience to turn their backs on him and walk away as they go out to the interval.

If the first half effectively conjures up a world of control, the chaos of the second half is unfortunately not stage managed enough. The leap between the classical senate and jack-booted contemporary soldier types wandering randomly around the Barbican's huge and empty stage seems too great. Equally, the device of raining down trash seems too solitary a gesture to convey an overall sense of chaos. It doesn't help that much of the dialogue between Brutus and Caius Cassius (Simon Russell Beale) is slightly muffled, leaving the potential dramatic focus of the second half - the argument between Cassius and Brutus - feeling unfocused.

Russell Beale unfolds his character gradually, a flawed man who nonetheless is more intuitively correct than either Caesar or Brutus. However, Lesser's Brutus is just too weedy and intellectual to allow us to understand why he is considered a worthy successor to Caesar. John Shrapnel plays Caesar brilliantly. His arrogance has an utterly impersonal quality to it that is in striking contrast to Cassius' emotionally driven decision-making; and his absolute self-belief, which can only be a kind of insanity, displays convincingly how he got to where he is. Whatever else he may be, wrong or right, he is a leader. Ralph Fiennes' performance as Mark Antony is more inscrutable. What are his motives? He seems a man with a violent distaste for democracy, perhaps because it is a hindrance to the kind of manipulative functioning he favours. In power, he becomes a brute.

Democracy or imperialism? Clear boundaries between the two are hard to maintain. Warner's version presents us with three equally unacceptable versions of political legitimacy. Rational responses founded on bloody actions are damned by their origins. Personal likings and vendettas as politics have tragic results. Crowd-driven politics result in chaos and bloodshed. Plenty of food for thought, but in the final judgement it is unfortunate that the production loses its momentum in the second half, after a striking beginning.

Till 14 May 2005