Shakespeare’s
Julius Caesar – A play for the modern age?
I recently went to see the production of Shakespeare’s play “Julius
Caesar” at the Bridge Theatre. The
Bridge Theatre is a new theatre on the Southbank of the Thames River, near Tower
Bridge and the London Assembly Building.
I originally booked it because I have a daughter who is doing A Levels
in English and Classical Civilisation and thought that the play would be good
for both. I wasn’t particularly pleased
when I saw that the Director (Nicholas Hytner) had done the play in modern
costume rather than as might befit the costumes that would have been
appropriate for the historical Julius Caesar.
I was completely wrong on this!
This production of the play is superb, very compelling and emotionally
convincing. The sound effects and stage
props gave a vivid and gripping image of the noise and ruin of modern civil
war.
The cheapest tickets were for people to stand in the pit of the theatre. The audiences seats are all around the
outside of the centre in which all the action takes place. You can’t therefore really call it a stage,
but the theatre had various sorts of clever ways of bringing stage props in and
out with the various parts of the floor raising and lowering and having the
crowd acting, in effect, as live props around whom the action was taking place
added tremendously to the atmosphere of the play.
We came in to a US Presidential style campaign rally with a fantastic
rock/punk style band with banners flying and being waved enthusiastically and
placards held up of Great Caesar! (David
Calder).
The Left/Liberal Directorship of the production actually didn’t grate at
all despite the attempts to introduce Trump style touches with red baseball
caps and, in fact, these seemed to simply make the whole play feel
that much more up to date.
The casting was multi-ethnic and also cast quite a number of women in
roles which Shakespeare had written for men and who were historically men as
well as being orignally homogeneously white Caucasian Romans, but these touches
of political correctness did not detract from the production.
The play has various relevancies to the modern world and not only with
Shakespeare’s superb language and ringing phrases, but also the productions political
messages include Brutus (Ben Whishaw) as the archetypal Left/Liberal elitist
obsessing about and making academic public speeches about abstract
constitutional theorising. This is including his unwillingness to follow through the logic of the
assignation to include the killing of Caesar’s immediate friends and, in
particular, Mark Antony. He is the
embodiment of the worst of all possible generals – the one who wants to be nice
to the enemy!
Mark Antony (David Morrisey) was superbly played, as Shakespeare draws
him, as a superbly effective, emotive and populist speaker but with more than a
whiff of dishonesty and hypocrisy.
Shakespeare’s play and this production rightly points out that most
people are not moved by appeals to abstract constitutional ideas, but are much
more ready to support and engage with ideas expressed with real emotional punch.
The play’s topical message for us therefore is that, in campaigning for England
and England’s future, we need to avoid the trap of the Brutus approach and aim
to be more Mark Antony, albeit an honest Mark Antony!
