Julius Caesar
Page 15
… the battles as such never took place and there was no fighting. There was some marching under falling snow, some thumping on the earth with staves, spears, or pikes, until the victims of a battle taking place elsewhere stumbled and staggered in, crumpling to the ground—to the accompaniment of another sung Latin dirge—smearing the walls with their blood.97
In this production the formation of a uniformed and well-organized militia made up from Caesar’s entourage took the place of the traditional mob. At Antony’s oration they infiltrated the audience, shouting inflammatory remarks as Tom Mannion’s manipulative Antony whipped them up into a frenzy of hate, ready to exact his revenge. Many critics decried the fact that an essential element of the play was missing by the omission of the ordinary Roman plebeians. Indeed, there does not appear to be a production of Julius Caesar in which the handling of the mob has been universally praised:
The citizens of Rome have a corporate identity in Julius Caesar that makes them as vital an element as any one of the leading characters of the drama. And the director who can’t manage them effectively can’t manage the play either. There are a number of alternatives, of course. You may use a large body of actors on zigger zagger lines and make your points by sheer weight of numbers. Or you may go to the opposite extreme and banish the crowd to the wings or even the audience. Or you may go in for a Brecht-like stylisation where a small group of actors is confined into a tiny space thereby suggesting by means of hemming in a small group an immensely larger one.98
This is all very well in theory but in practice these options, tried in their various forms, have failed to impress: large crowds of extras have led to excessive “rhubarbing,” and when played by amateur actors, have not provided the emotional response required; the mob have been dispensed with altogether and replaced by sound systems offstage; and the audience itself has been forced into that uncomfortable role, unsure of the levels of participation expected.
That ordinary citizens should be the ones who are manipulated into acts of extreme violence and civil dissent is an element of horror essential to the play. Violence leads to more violence, and Antony, possessed by the tyrannical spirit of Caesar, utters one of the most chilling speeches in Shakespeare’s canon:
And Caesar’s spirit ranging for revenge,
With Ate by his side, come hot from hell,
Shall in these confines, with a monarch’s voice
Cry havoc and let slip the dogs of war,
That this foul deed shall smell above the earth
With carrion men, groaning for burial. [3.1.289–94]
… the chilling incantation of any extremist given the motive and the opportunity to mobilize ordinary people with petty hatreds and self-serving motives into violent expression.
THE DIRECTOR’S CUT: INTERVIEWS WITH EDWARD HALL, DAVID FARR, AND LUCY BAILEY
Edward Hall, son of the RSC’s founder Sir Peter Hall, was born in 1967 and trained at Leeds University and the Mountview Theatre School before cutting his teeth at the Watermill Theatre in the 1990s. His first Shakespearean success was a production of Othello in 1995, though he used the experience as inspiration to found Propeller, an all-male theater company with whom he directed The Comedy of Errors and Henry V, which ran together in repertory during the 1997–98 season, and Twelfth Night in 1999, all at the Watermill. In 1998 he made his directorial debut with the RSC on a production of The Two Gentlemen of Verona, and would go on to work again with the company on Henry V in 2000–01 and, in the 2001–02 season, the production of Julius Caesar which he will be discussing here. In between Henry and Caesar that year, Hall returned to the Watermill to direct Rose Rage, his (in)famous and celebrated abattoir-set adaptation of the Henry VI trilogy. He left the RSC for good in 2002 and has continued to work with Propeller on such productions as A Midsummer Night’s Dream in 2003 and Twelfth Night and The Taming of the Shrew in 2007. He became artistic director of Hampstead Theatre in 2010.
David Farr is a writer and director, and has had an extraordinarily prolific career for such a young talent. He was artistic director of the Gate Theatre, London, from 1995 to 1998, moving on to the position of joint artistic director of Bristol Old Vic from 2002 to 2005. He became artistic director of the Lyric Theatre Hammersmith in 2005, where his productions included Water, The Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui, The Birthday Party, The Magic Carpet, Ramayana, The Odyssey, and a new version of Kafka’s Metamorphosis. As a playwright, his work includes The Nativity, Elton John’s Glasses, and Crime and Punishment in Dalston. David joined the RSC as an associate director in 2009, since which time he has directed Greg Hicks as Leontes in The Winter’s Tale (2009) and as the title role in King Lear (2010), though his first work with the company came in between his tenures at the Gate and the Old Vic, writing Night of the Soul for the company, which was produced at the Pit Theatre in 2001. He returned to direct an award-winning production of Coriolanus (also starring Greg Hicks) in 2002, and a boldly modernist production of Julius Caesar at the Swan Theatre in 2004, which David revived in his first season at the Lyric Hammersmith.
Lucy Bailey started her directorial career in experimental theater and moved on to work in opera before returning to theater in the mid-1990s. She continued her musical affiliations, however, founding the Gogmagogs in 1995 with violinist Nell Catchpole, known for their exciting hybrid performances combining virtuoso string playing and experimental physical theater. Her breakthrough 1999 production of Tennessee Williams’s Baby Doll in Birmingham found critical acclaim, and transferred to the National and the West End. Other directorial credits include Lady from the Far Sea for the Birmingham Repertory Theatre, Glass Eels and Comfort Me with Apples for Hampstead Theatre, and Don’t Look Now for the Lyceum Theatre in Sheffield and the Lyric Hammersmith. Her first major work with Shakespeare came in 2006 in her production of Titus Andronicus at Shakespeare’s Globe, followed by productions of Timon of Athens in 2008, and Macbeth in 2010. Her 2009–10 production of Julius Caesar for the RSC marked her directorial debut with the company.
Why is the play called Julius Caesar when he dies halfway through the play?
Hall: I suppose he would have had a lot of trouble on his hands trying to call it Brutus, Cassius, or Antony, because they are all pretty big parts and all three actors would probably want billing! I think because Julius Caesar was the center of that universe and the play is about whether or not the conspirators should topple it. He is a huge figure, and one I think Shakespeare was fascinated by. I think he was fascinated by all the lives of Plutarch, and particularly Julius Caesar. My production started with the triumph and I think that and the title help to show that this man is as close to a king, an emperor, even a god, as somebody could get to within a republic.
You have to remember that the Elizabethan audience did not live in a republic; Shakespeare is writing a play about a completely different political system and in many respects is exploring a theme, which he carried on to explore in Macbeth: the divine right of kings. When is it your duty to stand up and rebel against order and authority? It’s a constant debate of our time. If 300,000 people march in the street against the war in Iraq and Tony Blair ignores them, what else do we do? Shakespeare is exploring that idea but set in a period removed from the one in which he was living to avoid any danger involved in depicting the overthrow of a ruler; famously, the deposition scene was cut from Richard II, and then performed at the Globe on the eve of Essex’s revolt against Elizabeth I. Any stories on stage that depicted a ruler having their authority challenged were very difficult to get past the censor. Julius Caesar gave Shakespeare a great canvas to paint on where he could explore these issues fully. He touched on these themes lightly in Macbeth, where he couldn’t quite be as explicit as I think he wanted to be because he was writing for James I, a monarch who believed absolutely in the divine right of the king. So I think he called this Roman play Julius Caesar to make it absolutely clear that this was the story that he was exploring, and that it had no bearing on his present political or soc
ial circumstances: it was to take the heat off.
Farr: The play is fundamentally about what happens when you remove a king, or what happens when you remove a man of power who tries to reach too far, so the shadow of him hangs over the whole political system afterward. Although I suppose Brutus is technically the lead character, he is in no sense in the same way that Hamlet or King Lear is. The play examines the whole political structure and the effect that the death of the king has, so that is probably the reason for the title. For me the play is a wonderful, modern, pertinent examination of the tendency for a leader to try and push just a bit too far, in terms of their status within a society. That could be Elizabeth I or Vladimir Putin or Berlusconi in the modern world; we see it happen again and again and again. I remember when I directed it we discussed a lot the way in which modern leaders pass various laws: immunity from prosecution is a good example, which Putin and Berlusconi both passed, or whether it be certain presidential decrees, like George W. Bush’s creation of a particular department answerable only to him in order that he could bypass certain areas of the Pentagon. There are many wonderful modern examples of what Caesar has done in claiming his crown.
Bailey: It’s clear when you watch the play that the greatest man on that stage is Julius Caesar. Once he has been assassinated it feels as if all the rest are pygmies compared to him. He dominates the first half of the play, as the charismatic, verging on despotic, leader, and after he has been killed he returns to haunt it. I felt that the unifying element to the play was Julius Caesar—far from leaving the play, as soon as he is killed, his spirit lives on—no one stops talking about him. He returns in the second half to haunt Brutus, and in our production he appears at the very end as the revenging ghost stalking the battlefield, taking Brutus with him. One of the central questions that preoccupied Shakespeare and his contemporary audience was the nature of monarchy—at what point does monarchy become tyranny? Is it possible to rule without resorting to violence and suppression? Is assassination ever justified and does it produce change for the better? Julius Caesar reads like a political thriller, all the action of the first half is the tense lead-up to the assassination, and then the second half is the bloody aftermath. One man’s blood becomes a sea of blood.
Did you opt for an ancient setting or something to suggest more modern parallels?
Hall: My production had a more contemporary setting. It had an aura of fascism about it. I took the slogan “Peace, Freedom and Liberty,” which is one of the slogans which comes up in the play, as the party’s slogan: that’s what Caesar stood for. We had a huge neon sign at the back that lit up during the opening procession and the climax saying “Peace, Freedom and Liberty.” There were dark uniforms and jackboots, but over the top of that there was the stencil of ancient Rome: people wore rather elegant togas so you could still feel the classical world on stage.
Farr: We had a strong modern setting. We had a clear idea in our heads, which we didn’t need the audience to fully understand in order to experience the story, but which we essentially created in our heads: a modern nation state in which a Putin-like leader was doing exactly this, was attempting to extend his role into a long-term presidential role. At the time we were doing it Putin was considering changing the constitution from a five-year presidential reign to a ten-year one. He didn’t do it in the end, but he was considering it and we were inspired by that. So we used a modern language and we explored the idea of a theater company invading an existing government space, a factory I suppose, in order to present a kind of guerrilla underground version of this play as a mode of protest. There was a whole Brechtian guerrilla theater quality. The audience weren’t in on that and we didn’t try and make it overt, it was a way in which to make the story clear and feel urgent and immediate. It is a short play and it has got an intense pace about it; it doesn’t have as much eccentricity as some of Shakespeare’s other plays, it just does exactly what is intended, like a thriller. I was making it for the regional tour and I had a strong desire to make it for what I perceived to be a young audience, or an audience that was new to Shakespeare, and I felt it was important to make, in a sophisticated way, the work feel urgent and contemporary.
6. Edward Hall’s contemporary setting, RSC 2001–02: “We had a huge neon sign at the back which lit up during the opening procession and the climax saying ‘Peace, Freedom and Liberty.’ There were dark uniforms and jackboots but over the top of that there was the stencil of ancient Rome.”
Bailey: I was immediately drawn to the primal brutal world that Shakespeare depicts in this play, but at the same time very conscious of its contemporary resonance. It describes a world where the decisions of a few powerful men affect the lives of hundreds and thousands—where the repercussions of these decisions end up in mass slaughter. It couldn’t be more relevant today. The belief system of this world is pre-Christian, based on the amoral activities of the gods dictated by signs and portents. A world of stunning creativity and unbelievable cruelty—and not so far from our post-Christian world, which has returned to an excessive and similar obsession with sex and violence.
Working with my designer Bill Dudley, our first instinct was to avoid any architectural representation of Rome on stage. We wanted to capture the atmosphere of violence and panic that is the backdrop to the play—and is the climate in which the assassination takes place. This led us to the use of film to suggest a Rome full of frightened people—an irrational, unstable world governed by portents and dreams. Our set was incredibly simple to look at, but hard to realize. A series of six gauzes which could move in parallel to each other, creating entrances between them or becoming one flat backdrop. Onto these gauzes we projected images of our cast duplicated to become a massive crowd. These films would echo the action on stage, lending every scene in the first half a sense of frenetic movement and panic, and in the second half capturing the vast military campaign.
Do audiences need to be familiar with the backstory/events leading up to the play before it begins?
Hall: No, I don’t think an audience should ever need to be familiar with any of that. I think it’s our job to deliver the play in such a way that somebody can walk in from a heavy day’s work, collapse in a seat, look up and get taken on a journey where they don’t have to have swallowed a book or a dictionary to understand what is going on.
Bailey: It’s a brilliantly written political thriller—a real page-turner. The play starts mid-crisis, at fever pitch and continues at that pace, never letting up. Shakespeare is brilliant at encapsulating what has gone on before with an amazing brevity and speed. I think the challenge to the stage director is to tell the story in a way that illuminates the text. All the information you need is there in Shakespeare’s words, so it’s up to the production to excavate it. In the opening scene the Tribunes berate the crowd for forgetting their loyalty to their beloved Pompey, and cheering Caesar who destroyed him. I chose to extend the opening, fleshing out what Shakespeare has cleverly depicted in words with a more visceral stage picture. The Lupercal is a fertility festival and has its roots in the legend of Romulus and Remus and the violent birth of Rome. It is being celebrated in Rome on the same day as Caesar’s triumph. Caesar knows his victory over Pompey’s sons is extremely unpopular so he cannily turns it into a popular triumph by hijacking the Lupercal Carnival. This is implied rather than stated by Shakespeare. So we staged an amazing Bacchanalian and violent Lupercal with the wolfmen whipping women and segued deftly into Caesar’s magnificent triumph, the same confetti and madness in the air as affected the carnival, underlining the political maneuvering of this ruthless man.
Farr: Not at all. There are two things which you have to make clear. One is the notion of what a Lupercal holiday is—that is a difficult thing—and more important and equally difficult, because it is only related and not shown on stage, is the ceremony of the turning down of the crown: something that can be difficult for an audience to fully grasp. But once those two things are grasped, and if you can clarify exactly what the
y mean in your production, then the piece becomes crystal clear after that. Interestingly, I found in a contemporary setting the second half to be much easier, because I felt the whole notion of it breaking into civil war and the modernity of warfare very familiar. In the negotiating scene which goes wrong in the second half we used United Nations language, and suddenly the whole thing became alive and I found what everyone says is difficult about the play in the second half to be extremely rewarding.
What I found more difficult were Lupercalian celebrations and the sort of astrological chaos of the first few scenes, where they are talking about lions and that whole more cosmic Roman area. We explored that in a psyche-of-the-country kind of way and that worked to an extent, but as always with Shakespeare he was writing historical plays for his time. The difficulty this creates when directing is the overwhelming impulse to make it immediate for our time, but of course Shakespeare didn’t write for our time, he wrote for his time and so there is always a tension—a very interesting tension—that you do not want to just sit them back in the period, because he wasn’t interested in that. But at the same time, if you modernize thoughtlessly you are going to come a cropper, because he wasn’t writing for the year 2000.
And what about the specifically Roman stuff, such as Brutus adhering to the Stoic philosophy and Cassius to the Epicurean? Shakespeare must have expected most of his audience to know what he was talking about, but most of our audiences don’t have a clue, not having studied classics in school as every educated male did in Shakespeare’s time.
Hall: I don’t think that’s true. I think the majority of Shakespeare’s audience had no idea what these forms of rhetoric or belief were: most of the people who watched his plays were illiterate. The small amount of people who usually paid for the writing and performing of the plays would have understood that, but where Shakespeare is so brilliant is that you do not have to know any of these things to appreciate that one man is a jealous bear looking for revenge, and another man is torn so terribly because he has the ultimate liberal intellect and he understands every single angle of an argument. In a way that is Brutus’s curse. Stoicism can be confused with feeling relaxed about everything, and it’s not, and I think it drives Brutus into such a knot that his wife famously mutilates herself because she can’t bear the tension that he seems to be under. I don’t think you have to know anything about Stoicism or Epicureanism or any of those things to understand that. I think it’s an interesting sideline if you want to study more and I think it’s great for academics to expostulate on, but fundamentally it’s not something that drove us in the rehearsal room. What Shakespeare has written is a very strong, defined character and the lines and the action are an expression of his character and not of an intellectual idea. It may be that when you look back on it you say Brutus is a Stoic. But Brutus wouldn’t necessarily say he was a Stoic, and you don’t need to understand what Stoicism is to play Brutus. In fact it can be a hindrance that overtakes the role.