Caesar in Double Focus

Julius Caesar
Royal Shakespeare Company
The Observer

RON DANIELS’ production of Julius Caesar, which opened the new Stratford season last week, has great immediacy. Much of its attraction is visual. Farrah’s designs for the battle scenes of the second half—a muddy place for men to die in—are dark without being dispiriting. Ann Curtis has invented a high Roman fashion, and a becoming one; she has put all the men into red jerkins, signifying empire and blood. When the conspirators pay their nocturnal call on insomniac Brutus, he stands white-gowned against their scarlet, ironically Christ-like; which is rather how they see him, and how he sees himself.

The most public scenes we watch in double focus: in actuality, and on a giant telescreen. I could live without this, but it does allow us to contrast the boom of rhetoric with the nervous tics of the boomers. It is particularly appropriate with the opaque character of Caesar, dominantly played by Joseph O’Conor, obviously able, possibly megalomaniac, certainly miffed when allowed to refuse the crown. He has brought himself a young wife (Lesley Duff, very comely), whom he lectures affectionately on fear of death.

The justification for killing him is canvassed on the programme by selected politicians. Harold Wilson says no, and seems shocked anyone asked the question. Michael Foot says yes, by all means, and adds romantically that Shakespeare meant Cassius to be the hero; Emrys James does actually play him Welsh (well, he would), but not at all romantic. Neil Kinnock says no, are you kidding, by that bunch; and the production seems to be on Mr. Kinnock’s side.

Mr. O’Conor has his foibles, but he is nicer than Mr. James, who plays Cassius, well, for envy rather than misguided patriotism; it is he, not Brutus, who strikes the last blow, and he seems to enjoy it. What is endearing about him is the weariness that overtakes him; he is dog-tired in the quarrel scene, which Brutus still has the energy for righteous indignation.

A bearded looker, used to adulation, Peter McEnery worries his way conscientiously through Brutus’s self-questionings, coming infallibly up with the wrong answers. Lecturing the crowd, his hand pedantically cupping his chin, he is in his element, though he would never admit it.  

This is a more sympathetic Brutus than John Wood’s celebrated exposé of a liberal (‘liberal’ being one of those words, like ‘middle-class’ and ‘English,’ used scornfully by critics and playwrights to whom they all apply) and therefore more appropriate to the play, one of whose domnées is that people, not all of them self-seekers, like Brutus.

At the end he goes throaty,  tired either by life or by the verse. The latter is a constant problem. Antony these days is always under-cast. It should be possible to find a youngish actor who can handle rhetoric; and he doesn’t have to be that young. He is Brutus’s and Cassius’s contemporary, not Octavius’s. David Schofield, shock-headed, does not look like an experienced reveller, but at least he lets us appreciate Antony’s strategy. He brings Caesar’s widow along as Exhibit A, getting the mob to weep before they even hear the will. 

John Dicks, an actor I have much admired with Shared Experience, seems lost in this company, and is the only unfunny Casca I have known. But the conspirators are generally well differentiated. Metellus Cimber, who keeps suggesting safety precautions, is played very nervous; the actor, Paul Mooney, seems to have a gift for this sort of thing, since he subsequently gives us a nervously assertive Young Cato.

There are also some welcome old stagers: Gemma Jones a fine Portia who shows us the wound in her thigh (very nasty), Oliver Ford-Davies who doubles in the programme as helpful Roman historian, and as the Soothsayer, with the prescribed voice ‘shriller than all the music’, Griffith Jones, who has made a corner in prophets. His scene with Portia is a collector’s item.