Julius Caesar

Shakespeare certainly was on a winner. Julius Caesar is a political thriller about the most famous conspiracy and murder in history, with rich insights into tyranny and liberty, lots of blood and battle, but in a clear language more immediate than poetic.  Perfect for schools, where many of us ‘did’ it.

Peter Evans and Bell Shakespeare’s production is a restrained, admirable affair staged in the SOH Playhouse where, again, some in the BSC cast lack strong enough projection to reach the back rows and fully delight us with Shakespeare’s wonderful clarity of storytelling.  It works at Caesar’s funeral when the Roman plebians (well, four of them) spread throughput the audience and applaud Brutus’ claim to have saved Rome from tyranny, and then are swung back by Mark Antony’s masterful speech coaxing them to mourn Caesar – and rebel. 

Mark Leonard Winter is an unusually mercurial, louche Antony, a performance only marred by crashing across Antony’s speech, as Shakespeare builds irony and rhetoric, with vaudevillian funny business.  Veteran actor Peter Carroll amuses in a now familiar comic mode, if under-voiced, as the conspirator, Casca, and the tall Septimus Caton is perfectly pompous as Caesar, a king now in all but name.

Brutus’ evolving decision to murder Caesar to save Rome from kingship is superbly scored in Brigid Zengeni’s full bodied, gender-swapping performance.  The production reaches a rare emotional climax in the passionate argument on the eve of battle between Brutus and his co-conspirator Cassius (an intensely driven yet vulnerable Leon Ford). 

Evans’ open set oddly spotted with threads of vegetation, backed by huge panels in Roman colour tones, has by now been replaced by military tech and tents. Simone Romaniuk’s senators, effectively white suited on Capitol Hill are replaced at Philippi by green army drill.

The battles though are barely apparent, despite Madeleine Picard’s thunderous sound effectively underpinning the play’s momentous events.  Many horrors have been committed in the name of honour but at the centre of the pre-Christian world, it was such a compelling and useful Roman value.

Martin Portus

Photographer: Brett Boardman