121.
JULIUS CAESAR
St. Ann's Warehouse, 29 Jay Street, in Dumbo.
Although
Orson Welles staged a remarkable modern dress production of JULIUS CAESAR in
1937, illuminating the play by setting it in the world of 1930s European Fascism,
the vast majority of later productions have kept the play in some version of
ancient Rome. None of the 15 influential productions described in my 1986 book,
Shakespeare around the Globe: a Guide to
Notable Postwar Revivals, has an idiosyncratic background, which is not to
say that other productions have not had them. Just last season, the Brooklyn
Academy of Music presented the Royal Shakespeare Company’s all-black staging,
set in a an unnamed African country, and employed modern dress with hints of
Roman togas.
Now
an even more powerful British production has hit these shores, also in Brooklyn,
with the Donmar Warehouse’s version, on view at St. Ann’s Warehouse in Dumbo.
This one has an entirely female cast and is conceived as a rehearsal of the
play inside a women’s prison. (A similar idea, but with a male company, is
behind the acclaimed 2012 Italian film, Caesar
Must Die.) The racially mixed company of 14 actors, whose best-known artist
is the outstanding Dame Harriet Walter, playing Brutus, thrusts every bit of
human energy into its relentless performance, staged by Phyllida Lloyd, with
crystal-clear diction and consistently enlightening readings that make the play
sizzle with life throughout its two intermissionless hours.
St.
Ann’s, with its loading docks, rolling gates, and oversized, metal double
doors, is the perfect venue for creating a prison-like environment. The
audience is forced to wait on line outside and is admitted to an enclosed
loading dock in batches of about 50 each, where uniformed guards oversee them
as one of them issues a stern warning that cell phones will be confiscated if
they aren’t turned off. When you do go in you are faced by banks of seats
occupied by those who entered earlier. The same loading dock later becomes an
important entryway during the play. The wall into which the dock’s rolling
metal gate is set is lined with a catwalk and also has a guardroom behind glass
windows, where the prison officials can keep watch over the proceedings.
Designer
Bunny Christie deserves high marks for her imaginative use of the space, just
as does Neil Austin for his exceptional lighting, which manages to create
effects that seem appropriate to the instruments potentially available in a
women’s prison. Ms. Christie
has dressed the
inmates’ in sweatpants and hooded sweatshirts, accented here and
there by individual touches, including Caesar’s beret and Brutus' long coat, make suitable
substitutes for the togas and robes that usually encase the actors of this
play. The camouflage gear and ski masks worn during the battle scenes,
however, are now de rigueur for modern-dress Shakespeare.
This
is a rapidly paced, high-energy, textually trimmed-down production, that wrings
every bit of nuance out of the power politics that inform both the play and the
world of prison life, with its shifting allegiances and cliques. Rubber knives
and toy pistols and rifles stand in for swords and daggers as drum beats mark the shootings that occur;
prison spotlights, manipulated by guards, illuminate some of the
action; Caesar’s followers wear paper masks with his face on them; heavy metal
electric guitar and percussion music (by Garry Yerson), played by inmates,
highlights certain moments; red rubber gloves suggest hands steeped
in blood; an actor portrays a vicious dog; the petite soothsayer (Carrie Rock) rides
through the play on a tricycle, wearing a tutu; and video cameras
portray the way in which politics exploits the media and vice versa. Aiding immeasurably in the assured staging is
the choreographed movement created by Ann Yee.
There
are many inventive theatrical touches. For example, I was seated in the second
row, center, and noticed that the center seat in the first row and the one
behind it, next to me, were empty, which made me wonder why they were
unoccupied for a sold-out show. That question was dispelled during the murder
of Caesar (Florence Barber) in the Senate, when he was forced into the first
row seat by the assassins; one of them came into my row and throttled him
from behind as he was forced to drink something horrible from a blue plastic
bottle and then stabbed multiple times. After the trusted Brutus pierced him,
Caesar, lying on the floor, burst into hysterical laughter. It was as if the
irony of Brutus’ action struck a cosmic funny bone in the dying leader; only then did he say, “Et tu, Brute?”
Dame
Harriet, her figure slim and boyish at 63, wears her hair mannishly short, allowing her face, with its fascinating angles, to seem more expressive than ever; for all her macho qualities when playing Brutus, her natural sensitivity
consistently informs her magnetic performance. She is matched by the much
younger Cush Jumbo’s Mark Antony; Antony's clever manipulation of the mob in his funeral oration is sensational; later, Antony's command over them is magnificently
staged as if he were a choral conductor, using physical gestures to raise and
lower their emotional temperature as musical cues accompany his movements. There is also a remarkably potent Cassius in
the person of Jenny Jules, whose vocal and emotional power never flags, while
Frances Barber’s brutishly sinister Caesar is equally compelling and strong,
belying Ms. Barber’s porcelain features; a scene when Caesar picks on
Cassius for being suspiciously “lean and hungry” turns startlingly ugly when the ruler
stuffs a donut into Cassius’ mouth and then bites down on it himself in a
sadistically brutal kiss. Later, in a casually silent moment, when we eventually
learn who in the prison’s population has been playing Caesar, we get an
interesting insight in the way JULIUS CAESAR expresses the uses and abuses of
power. Even smaller roles, like Clare Dunne’s Portia, are played to perfection
in this exceptional revival. (Ms. Dunne, who also plays Octavius, wears a padded belly to suggest that the prisoner is pregnant.)
Regardless
of its unusual theatrical gimmickry, this production remains steadfastly
faithful to the play while both deepening and subverting its traditional
meanings. All-male productions of Shakespeare—which, after all is how he was
originally done—are no longer unusual (two are opening soon on Broadway), but
all-female revivals are. Other recent ones, of HAMLET and TITUS ANDRONICUS,
have been reported; such ventures can be done as well as this JULIUS CAESAR, I look
forward to even more.
