Review
of Julius Caesar by William
Shakespeare
Directed
by Lucy Bailey
The
Royal Shakespeare Company, Courtyard Theatre, Stratford-upon-Avon
June
23, 2009
Director Lucy Bailey has earned critical acclaim
for her startlingly inventive staging of classical plays. Her productions
feature a bold visual aesthetic in which innovative use of space, design, and
movement take center stage. Following highly theatricalized interpretations of Titus Andronicus and Timon of Athens at the Globe Theatre,
Bailey makes her directorial debut at the Royal Shakespeare Company with a
visually compelling, but flawed interpretation of Julius Caesar.
It is an intriguing pairing: Julius
Caesar, one of Shakespeare’s most language-driven and male-centered plays,
and Bailey, a female director best-known for her fiercely imaginative visual
staging. The production starts with an extra-textual preshow; two feral boys,
the wolf-reared twins Romulus and Remus, stalk the stage, growling at one another
like territorial dogs. A fight erupts, and Remus is killed, his throat torn
open by his brother. With this graphic beginning, Bailey signals that masculine
violence, ever-present beneath the civilized facade of Roman society, will be
her central focus. Language, the instrument of reason, will take a backseat to
brute physicality.
As a sensory experience, the production certainly
delivers on expectations. Audiences have learned that Bailey never shies away
from sensational or experimental techniques; her Titus Andronicus at the Globe Theatre attracted sell-out crowds
lured by press accounts of the graphic onstage gore and the nightly sideshow of
fainting audience members; Timon of
Athens featured aerial performers in rappelling harnesses flying down from
the rafters like carnivorous birds. Bailey’s
Julius Caesar is equally creative, if ultimately less satisfying. She
reprises her collaboration with designer William Dudley, her creative partner
on the Globe plays. A pioneer in the use of high-tech media for theatre, Dudley
has created a virtual environment, complete with digitally-enhanced supporting
cast, to represent Caesar’s Rome. Projected still images and computer-
generated animation establish shifts in locale, and video sequences supplement
the live cast in the mob scenes. Minimalist set pieces dress a largely bare
stage.
The interplay between virtual and live action is
surprising and often effective, as when soldiers burst through gaps between the
overlapping projection screens to join onstage battle scenes. At times,
however, the high-tech stagecraft falls a bit flat. Although a clever tactic
for enhancing a lean cast of extras, the virtual mob never seems particularly
bloodthirsty or chaotic, and its stylized movement, replicated on multiple
screens, frequently fails to cohere with the spoken dialogue. Ultimately,
Dudley’s visual sleight of hand (including computer-generated animation
depicting the explosion of a cartoonish statue of Caesar) intrudes as often as
it enhances, pulling focus from the serious ethical questions raised in this
tragedy of political assassination and civil war.
In the pivotal role of Brutus, Sam Troughton
commits the cardinal sin of live performance: he simply cannot be heard. Having
worked extensively in film and television in recent years, Troughton struggles
to adjust to the acoustic demands of the Courtyard Theatre. His performance,
finely crafted though it might be, is all but lost to the audience. In an early
scene between Brutus and Cassius (John Mackay), both actors succumb to poor
projection and ultra-subtle Chekhovian acting, making their dialogue extremely
difficult to follow. With the world’s best voice and text specialists available
to the cast, this is a telling oversight, symptomatic of an over-conceptualized
production that places more emphasis on visual novelty than on Shakespeare’s
language.
In the title role, Greg Hicks gives a full-tilt
performance at stylistic odds with Troughton’s cinematic Brutus. Despite his
slight frame, Hicks captures Caesar’s larger-than-life glamour through
expansive gestures and impressive vocal dexterity. His Caesar breathes
arrogance. During the harrowing assassination scene, he fights hard to remain
upright as his body is riddled with wounds, before finally tumbling to the base
of a steep step unit. Only in death is Hicks’s Caesar finally stripped of
hubris, his splayed, bare legs a reminder of the human frailty beneath the
demi-god mystique.
Darrell D’Silva’s portly Mark Antony is a career
soldier gone badly to seed. Whether spewing drink after a night of partying, or
casually tossing around a severed head, D’Silva gives his role a darkly
humorous turn. Part voluptuary, part master politician, his Antony is a jaded,
but self-aware manipulator, still likable despite his flaws.
In this macho Rome, women play minor roles. As
Calpurnia, Noma Dumezweni is a gorgeous trophy wife, her resonant voice and
regal bearing commanding focus in this small part. Hannah Young portrays
Portia, Brutus’s troubled spouse. Her intense emotionalism, in stark contrast
to Trouthton’s detached Brutus, makes the eventual news of her ghastly suicide
believable.
Despite a brilliant creative team and first-rate
actors, this production never quite gels. Lush special effects cannot
substitute for clear directorial shaping of story and characterization. One
suspects that Bailey serves up pictorial tricks to compensate for a wordy script
and relatively static plot. However, the production would be better served if
she aimed for greater balance between textual and visual production components,
and learned to trust the playwright.
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