Julius Caesar

by William Shakespeare

  3. Terry Hands’s production in 1987 had a stripped-down stage and instead used lighting sculpturally. His was “a harsh, imperious world: the space is defined by brutal columns of white light.”

  Clearly, there’s no alternative to Caesar, and the senators conspire in private darkness; at the end, Brutus and Cassius are isolated in black spaces of error, terror and division pierced by sinister shafts of purple light.71

  David Thacker’s 1993 production at The Other Place was the first RSC production of Julius Caesar to dispense with Roman dress. He set his play in a very recognizable European world of late twentieth-century conflict:

  1989 was a time of huge change in eastern European society. As a revolutionary play Julius Caesar sits happily in revolutionary times. We felt that the political schism in the Eastern Bloc which is so fresh in our minds would give the production dynamism and contemporary relevance … We agreed there was little to be gained from squeezing the play into a specifically Romanian, Russian or Czechoslovakian setting or by saying that Caesar is Gorbachev, Ceauşescu, Honecker. We were not wanting to create direct or specific parallels but rather to draw on the power of contemporary political change in order to demonstrate the seriousness and relevance of the issues addressed in the play. To be non-specific about a setting is not to be evasive or indecisive but to allow members of the audience to make other associations of dictatorship and the struggle for democracy for instance in South Africa or Latin America.

  The potency of modern dress cannot be underestimated for an audience which might find Shakespeare’s verse alienating. Images of suited politicians and uniformed generals in contrast to a poorly dressed crowd have the immediacy and apparent veracity of a news story on television. The struggle for democracy encapsulated in Julius Caesar is sadly still going on.72

  In order to hit home the contemporary experience and make the audience more directly involved with the action of the play, Thacker decided to stage the play as a promenade production. The audience stood around the actors, witnesses to the action at close proximity. One reviewer commented:

  To find yourself standing a mere yard from the assassins as they roll up their shirt-sleeves and bathe their arms in Caesar’s blood is as nicely horrid as you can imagine.73

  In an interview for the Independent, Thacker explained his choice:

  This is a play about people manipulating or dealing with crowds … I thought it would be theatrically exciting to have people there on stage so they experience being in a large group of people hearing the speeches. I hope it might make them think “Would I believe this?” in a more concrete way than usual.74

  4. David Thacker’s 1993 RSC production had a promenade audience: “To find yourself standing a mere yard from the assassins as they roll up their shirt-sleeves and bathe their arms in Caesar’s blood is as nicely horrid as you can imagine.”

  A fine balance was reached in which the audience were not compelled to engage with the actors but were used as an integral part of the staging:

  To call this production promenade is only a short hand to say there are no seats: this is not a conventional audience-stage relationship. A promenade performance usually means moving from area to area in a huge space so that the audience is literally taken on a journey. This production is, in reality, more “environmental.” The audience is in and of that environment, not only close to but also participating in the action: the human walls in which our drama is played.75

  In creating a direct correlation between what people were witnessing on the television at home sitting on their sofa, and what they saw standing in the theater, Thacker took his audiences into a world disturbingly reminiscent of the Bosnian conflict. The battles took place amid the sound of machine-gun fire, and propagandists walked in among the audience and actors with video cameras filming the action. This method of staging gave the production an energy and excitement many others have lacked. Many praised the production’s contemporary directness:

  Photos of David Sumner’s Caesar festoon the theatre walls, and then on comes the man himself, tracked by a video-camera as he saunters through the modern-day mob in his expensive Italian serge … The lynching of Cinna the poet might be the climax of an ugly riot on a London estate. Philippi might be happening in Bosnia tomorrow. This is not a Julius Caesar for those in search of subtlety; but for those who want action, it is a production to admire.76

  The stage devices, which had proved effective in Thacker’s production, were picked up in David Farr’s touring production in 2004:

  Stage managers double as performers, visibly pushing computer keys to make the neon lights fizz and flash for a Roman storm, then playing servants, then crouching down with follow-spots that irradiate Brutus’s face or video cameras that transpose public speeches to a screen behind an empty stage. Empty that is, except when battle occurs—and institutional chairs and tables are hurled about or used as barricades.77

  Although the design had references to conflict in Eastern Europe, and especially civil conflict in Russia, the inferences reflected current feelings about the war in Iraq:

  Together with designer Ti Green, he has created a loosely contemporary Rome that describes the confused world we live in at the moment, one in which people want their leaders to be strong and yet not arrogantly autocratic, and where a clear-cut objective—to remove a tyrant in the name of freedom—unleashes violent disorder. The mob—dressed in fashionable casuals—clamber up steel gantries, holler the name “Caesar” and unfurl banners onto which video images of the suited politician are projected.78

  the programme is filled with references to Putin and Berlusconi … when Brutus urges the assassination of Caesar, even if “the quarrel will bear no colour for the thing he is,” we suddenly seem to be in the chilling world of pre-emptive regime-change.79

  For Always I Am Caesar

  Caesar’s weaknesses, and there are many, balance but do not cancel out his symbolic strength.80

  Contrary to what many critics assume, Julius Caesar is not a play of two halves. The action is continuous and is often best when played without an interval. When a break is taken after the assassination scene, or the murder of Cinna the Poet, it can often kill the momentum of the preceding acts and give the play a disjointed feel. Directors are keen to establish a strong sense of Caesar’s influence and dominant spirit after the assassination by use of various stage devices. In 1968, director John Barton knew

  that Caesar never ceases to rule. In death his presence governs the tragedy81 … In life, in the person of Brewster Mason, the dictator is physically dominating, not the husk we have had so often. On the very edge of death, bleeding from the daggers of the faction, he advances upon the agonized Brutus like the incarnation of doom itself, and at “Et tu, Brute?—Then fall, Caesar” [3.1.84], himself guides home the blade.

  From that moment Brutus is lost. From that minute the leaders of the conspiracy are haunted men. Caesar is in his coffin, but the mantle he first wore on a summer’s evening in his tent, “That day he overcame the Nervii” [3.2.177], is used, tattered now and bloodstained, as the symbol of his avengers. During the parley upon the plains of Philippi the rebels see the sign before them. At the last, battle done, Mark Antony, even in his salute to the “noblest Roman of them all” covers Brutus’s body with the mantle in which … Caesar had fallen at the base of Pompey’s statue. Moreover, Mr Barton lets the ghost of Caesar walk abroad. He appears not only at Sardis, but he comes also, a figure barely seen in the gloom, after the parting of Brutus and Cassius before battle. Later, in his moment of suicide, Brutus falls dead while the silent apparition towers above him.82

  In 1972, Mark Dignam played Caesar as a genuinely dangerous figure. The set and costuming heavily featured fascist symbolism, with red, white, and black the predominant colors:

  It is full of banners, insignia of Caesar and arrogant legionaries within whose hearing it’s safer to keep silence, and almost literally bestridden by a colossus. Mark Dignam is a formidable Caesar, bland, brazen
and imperious as he strides downstage on his red carpet to outstare gods and Gods alike, a half-smile, half-scowl on a face alarmingly like that of a 60 year old Mussolini. Indeed, both he and Rome itself might have been lifted from one of the Duce’s more vain-glorious fantasies, down to the scampering retinue of sycophantic senators who chorus “hail Caesar” whenever his voice hits that public, finite note which they know to be their cue … 83

  Trevor Nunn had an immense statue of this “colossus of Rome” permanently on stage to symbolize Caesar’s dominating spirit:

  Critics admired Dignam’s performance and praised the production’s overall emphasis on Caesar. The nearly continuous presence on stage of a huge statue of Caesar underscored the character’s dominance as a public figure and, after his death, his undiminished influence on events.84

  The statue was also a potent reminder of how Caesar’s own persona had been enveloped by a public myth:

  There you have the man whose public image has so engulfed the private person that personal relationships are no longer comfortable. The same dichotomy was in this production well conveyed by the introduction of Caesar’s colossal statue into the one scene of his domestic life. Standing uneasily in the shadow of his public image Caesar cannot act naturally to his friends or even to his wife … The most significant irony of the play is that Brutus, regretting that in order to destroy the public Caesar he must kill the private one, ends by recognising that although the private friend has been duly killed, the public Caesar persists indestructibly. This is the lesson repeatedly voiced by the characters and embodied in the visitation of Caesar’s spirit to Brutus’s tent on the night before the conspirators are finally liquidated at Philippi. For this visitation the statue, terrifyingly heralded by the nightmare cries of the sleepers, served well … 85

  5. Trevor Nunn’s 1972 RSC production was “full of banners, insignia of Caesar”; “Mark Dignam is a formidable Caesar, bland, brazen and imperious as he strides downstage on his red carpet to outstare gods and Gods alike, a half-smile, half-scowl on a face alarmingly like that of a 60 year old Mussolini.”

  In the working out of Caesar’s revenge, supernatural as well as symbolic inferences were also placed on the statue: “Even after his death his gargantuan statue looms above the action, the features lit by a symbolic red spot as one by one his enemies perish.”86

  Many productions have been more visceral in their depiction of Caesar’s influence after death. In 1987 his reanimated corpse was seen on the battlefield:

  The ghost of Caesar, as promised in the tent scene, reappears at Philippi walking slowly among Brutus’s forces and forcing him to back stage left in horror. When Brutus finally runs onto the sword held by Strato kneeling on the edge of the stage with his back to the audience, the triumphant ghost begins to march down centre stage slowly.87

  More chillingly, in David Thacker’s 1993 production one of the soldiers killing prisoners after the battle removes his balaclava and reveals himself to Brutus as the Ghost of Caesar.88

  “The Work We Have in Hand, Most Bloody, Fiery, and Most Terrible”

  Every decade has its despots and you always wonder how did society fall for these people and obey them. But Julius Caesar is about more than that. It is a play about power and what happens if that power is toppled. It looks at what happens if you kill a leader. It is very easy to say we should assassinate Hitler or Saddam Hussein but what does that unleash?89

  As we know, regime change can unleash violence, hatred, and extremism. If, as Brutus says, “There is a tide in the affairs of men,” one must question if he has chosen his time wisely. Regardless of his underestimation of Antony, behind the conspiracy and plot, which is executed in the rational world, there lies a supernatural inevitability in the working out of fate. Even Cassius toward the end of the play questions his edict that it is “not in our stars, but in ourselves” that we are thus. Tragically, Brutus’ vision of the purification of Rome by ritual bloodletting, a role enacted by his ancestors, has the adverse effect—a “vile contagion” follows which will destroy Rome and all that he lives for:

  By the end of the play, Brutus has killed all those he loves. He kills Caesar and he kills his wife and Cassius, by his behaviour on the battlefield which brings about the defeat of the army. It is a very much more mysterious play than is often assumed. What about the soothsayer, whom Caesar hears above the hubbub and din of the crowd, the question of the barrenness of Caesar’s wife, her dreams of Caesar’s statue spouting blood, the ghosts, the suicides, the portents, the mob which tears to pieces a man who coincidentally bears a conspirator’s name? Is this about anything as banal as politics? We are talking about a lurid and very romantic study of the effects of passion in a male-dominated world.

  Then again, the ghost of Caesar describes himself as Brutus’s ‘evil spirit.’ Why does he not say that he is the ghost of Caesar? We can speculate as to what he means by Brutus’s evil spirit. Is it Brutus’s ability to kill the things he loves?90

  Is Brutus’ act like Macbeth’s? Was Caesar destined to be king and has Brutus usurped divine right and committed a sacrilegious act by his murder? There are similarities but, unlike Macbeth, we cannot call Brutus a villain as his intents are for Rome and the ideals it signifies. However, the effectiveness of Shakespeare’s writing of the assassination scene, in which an all-too-mortal and defenseless man is brutally stabbed in front of our eyes, cannot help but make our attitude ambivalent to the conspirators’ actions. The similarities lie in what “regicide” unleashes, and this has become a major concern of the modern director. Could the conspirators ever succeed with such a murder on their hands and conscience? In the last fifty years there has been increased savagery in the depiction of violence and the use of blood as the major symbol of the play’s thematic concerns. From a play that was considered Stoic and wordy, Julius Caesar has progressed into something much more visceral. In 1991 Steven Pimlott’s production paid service to modern and recognizable depictions of physical horror:

  Pimlott appears to have a real relish for violence. The show memorably captures the baying, brainless belligerence of the mob, and the scene in which they lay into the gentle poet Cinna is almost unwatchable in its sadistic ferocity. And, far from carving Caesar as a dish fit for the gods, the assassination is lingeringly, almost longingly presented like a scene in a “slasher” horror movie, with lashings of blood with which the conspirators smear their faces as well as their hands.91

  The play’s obsession with methods of suicide and slow inflictions of death has never been so marked. Caesar’s extended knifing is a messy kill at the bullfight. Cinna the Poet is torn to pieces together with his verses. The architectural corridor of Rome is replaced in a long interval by the sarcophagus of Sardis and Philippi. Here soldiers lie down and cringe in trench helmets like frozen figures in a First World War memorial sculpture.92

  Taken to another level of experience,

  David Thacker’s presentation of the assassination scene made the audience feel uncomfortably close to the action. The conspirators ominously emerged from the audience one by one and in a trance-like series of moves advanced towards Caesar and stabbed him. Caesar who was reduced to his knees finally grabbed Brutus by the legs and looked into his eyes before uttering “Et tu, Brute?” All of the conspirators avoided making eye contact with the audience in the moments after, as Caesar’s body was wheeled out on a hospital trolley.93

  Peter Hall’s 1995 production was not well received but was particularly noted for the fact that

  Visible blood provided a recurring motif: it spurted from the joint between Caesar’s neck and shoulder after Casca stabbed him; there was plentiful blood on the hands and swords of the conspirators after the assassination; it spurted from Cinna the Poet after the mob had stabbed and beaten him to death; a bucket of blood was poured down the steps after the mob scene; Caesar’s corpse, on display, was stained red with blood; Octavius’s face, in battle was streaked with blood; blood streamed down the face of the vast eff
igy of Caesar at the end of the play.94

  The stage became a nightmarish place of paranoia and disorder, in which an uncanny atmosphere foreboded the imminent threat of physical violence:

  Hall’s initial achievement is to evoke a Rome in the throes of a living nightmare. John Gunter’s sombre, panelled set is dominated by a giant mask of Caesar, Guy Woolfenden’s eerie chords fill the air with a sense of omen, and public figures are beset by private fears. Christopher Benjamin’s Caesar starts nervously on being accosted by a soothsayer, and John Nettles’s Brutus gazes into the sultry pit where the feast of Lupercal is taking place with the horror of a man witnessing the birth of a dictatorship.95

  In Edward Hall’s production in 2000, the removal of Caesar was equated with the removal of Rome’s heart and the slow death of the body politic:

  Hall made some extraordinary decisions … omitting the first scene of tribunes and plebeians altogether, replacing it with an initial tableau in which a reappearing ragged Soothsayer opens a small trap on the forestage to take out and display aloft a bleeding heart, presumably the “heart within the beast” [2.2.42] which augurers could not find for Caesar. Later, hung upside down in chains, Cinna the poet’s heart is plucked from his breast by a terrifying Brünhilde96 figure—apparently the same who has led Caesar in procession onto the stage at the start of act 1, scene 2, with a rousing, sung anthem to the “Res-publica” … in this production, woman as Fascist functionary comes into her own, on terms of complete equality to her male counterparts.