By William
Shakespeare
Bell Shakespeare
Heath Ledger Theatre, State Theatre Centre
August 8-11
Julius Caesar is a
problematic play, and this is a problematic staging of it.
I’m not quite sure
why Bell Shakespeare have taken it out on the road so soon (seven years) after
they last mounted it, and I couldn’t find anything in particular compelling
about it to have forced their hand.
Whether we’re to make
anything of its extensive gender and ethnic impartiality (five of the
historical and original male characters are played by women; Caesar by an African
American), there’s nothing especially ground-breaking about it – indeed a major
“drawcard” of Bell’s last crack at Caesar was the casting of Kate Mulvany, who
also delivered a terse, concertinaed adaptation of the script, as Cassius.
Which leaves us with
the problems of the play, and how Bell dealt with them, and it’s a mixed report
card.
The elephant in the
room (okay, allow me a little Hannibal joke) is Julius himself. The play is
mistitled, of course – it should be Antony and Brutus, but Shakespeare
obviously was saving the latter part of the title for Cleopatra. Julius is,
after all, merely the victim of the play’s pivotal moment, and that happens
fairly early on in the piece.
Before it, he does
nothing other than ignore some ultimately good advice, change his mind a couple
of times (so much for being “as constant as the northern star”) and wander into
a one-way knife event.
He’s barely more
important, either to his play or the parade of Shakespeare’s characters, than
Duncan in Macbeth, and no-one has ever thought to re-name the Scottish Play
after him.
Bell’s last Caesar,
Alex Menglet, played him like an ailing Russian oligarch, which was a bit comic
but made some useful points about the unsuitability of any individual to claim
the entire apparatus of a modern state for themselves.
I could find no
similarly useful points in Kenneth Ransome’s awkward portrayal of the general
who would be king.
On the other hand,
Sara Zwangobani’s Mark Antony did bring something to her role. She stripped
Antony’s great “friends, Romans, countrymen” of much of its rhetorical flourish
and left it as the prowling, snarling incitement to slaughter it is.
Perhaps the
production’s best – and most surprising – moment was the argument and
reconciliation between the conspirators Brutus (Ivan Donato) and Cassius (Nick
Simpson-Deeks) in IV.iii. They squabble and flatter each other like the doomed
children they are while the pincers of the vengeful Antony and ambitious
Octavius (Emily Havea, effective as a Prince on the cusp of her purple reign)
close in on them.
From the end of Antony’s
speech on, the playing out of Julius Caesar is as weakly constructed and
written as anything in Shakespeare.
To their credit, Donato
and Simpson-Deeks at least made it worth sitting through.
