Julius Caesar

It's an issue that director Atri Banerjee tackles head on, pimping up the play with all manner of extra theatrical business. Movement director Jennifer Jackson introduces a prologue in which actors swirl and howl before launching into a tightly choreographed dance reminiscent of the Elizabethan post-play jig. Adam Sinclair’s animated projections loom ominously over the dwarfed actors, contemporarily addressed, while shrouded in ubiquitous haze and smeared in black blood. There's a countdown clock that got the audience at The Theatre Royal back in their seats post interval. Alexandre Ferrari's extraordinary vocal talent is backed by a Norwich based Greek chorus, while the rumbling of Jasmin Kent Rodgman's score is a portent of things to come.
 
It's all tremendously well done, offering up arresting images and sounds, but sadly acts as a diversion, rather than as a complement, to what is otherwise a decidedly patchy production. Such was the dislocation between production and text that when music mysteriously emerged from the auditorium I briefly wondered what this new trick this was, before the penny dropped it was someone's phone ringing. Atri Banerjee's stated mission was to present a more complex understanding of the world, but what we got instead was a flashily presented evening that failed to illuminate or explain. Instead, it livened up a stilted and uneven run through of the text with literal smoke and metaphorical mirrors, but such was his misplaced focus that the actors frequently seemed cut adrift from the text they were required to deliver. 
 
In such a large cast one can expect mediocrity in minor roles, but there some unusually poor performances, revealing an inability to deliver coherently or even audibly. Blame for this must go to the director, who one has to assume was too involved with his leads and his box of tricks to notice. Fortunately, there was quality to be seen and heard on stage in the main roles, with Nigel Barret convincing as the bombastic Caesar and Mathew Bulgo as the unctuous Casca. William Robinson proved very effective as Mark Antony, offering up one of the strongest performances of the night. He appeared to have a shaky start, but on reflection the uncertainty may have been Antony's, not the actor's. They both came into their own when delivering one of the best known speeches in the Shakespeare canon, a rare and welcome point at which Banerjee wisely let the text do all the talking. 
 
Most of the heavy lifting, however, was done by Thalissa Teixeira, who was excellent as Brutus, the real protagonist in this tragedy. There has been a lot of chatter about the casting of a woman of colour in the role, but frankly I can't see what the fuss is about. Shakespeare was writing for a patriarchal audience about patriarchal Rome. All the meaty parts are for men, and white men at that, as is the case for most of his plays. It would be absurd to restrict the performance of those plays to a narrow group of actors in a nod to historical verisimilitude. What I do question is the text-mangling shift of the character's gender. This seemed particularly inexplicable given the casting of Annabel Baldwin in the play's other key role. Baldwin is non-binary and must surely have questioned the need to have the gender of Cassius changed to female. While Julius Caesar is obviously political, it’s much more to do with masculine toxicity. Changing the two characters to women, particularly when one of the actors wouldn't identify as such, undermines the central premise of the play. Bluntly put, women don't tend to behave this way, making the plot a tad nonsensical.
 
Julius Caesar is renowned as a play of two uneasy parts, and following the intrigue and endless chatter of the earlier half, the play is given over to the chaos that ensues, following (spolier alert) the assassination of the eponymous ruler. At the time, the shock of seeing Caesar despatched so early in the play must have been akin to Janet Leigh's demise in Psycho. It certainly surprised me the first time I saw the play. It’s a tough act to follow. What does follow is a lot of running around, recrimination and death. Dramatically, a concluding battle was always going to be a challenge to stage engagingly. In other productions, I’ve seen a lot of pointing going on, at the action just beyond our field of vision. Banerjee's solution is to have characters return from the dead, not least Caesar himself, echoing Banquo's ghost as he waves nonchalantly from beyond the grave. It was an audacious move, and delivered with some dramatic success, but goodness only knows what anyone new to the play would have made of the reanimation of those despatched not by the sword, but the open palmed hand, smeared with oily black goo. It only served to emphasise that while this was a bold attempt to enliven a problematic play, ultimately the embellishments employed buried the narrative under the weight of stage trickery.