Julius Caesar
Riverside Studios
The Observer

Peter Gill’s production of Julius Caesar (Riverside Studios) has the best Shakespearean crowd scenes in recent memory. There is nothing apologetic about them; no pretence that three or four actors can- if symbolically grouped, murkily lit and encouraged to stomp or change in unison- do the work of a dozen.

Mr Gill has about 20 actors to play with and he sends them on in swiftly varying formations; as soldiers- standing, turning, and even executing a balletic battle that is over before you have time to quest it- or as citizens. In the intervening scenes they play individual officers or conspirators, two or three apiece, But the doubling is never either obtrusive or confusing.

All the men are dressed in the same grey uniform: tunics, socks and long winter underwear. The effect is not prepossessing, but it is immensely useful- an enshrouding anonymity from which each player can emerge and to which he can return. While on, he has to trust to the script and his own skills to establish him; and though the level of success if variable no-one actually fails. The play is kept taut.

The scenes of full orchestration are thrilling. Brutus and Antony make their orations from precarious plinths actually borne aloft by the mob they are addressing: a foot or a word wrong and they will slip and, presumably be torn to pieces. Or be kicked to death: as happens in the ensuing savagely-staged scene, to China the poet. As the lights go down on his remains, the first act ends with an off-stage shout of ‘Caesar’, a cry repeated at the close, when the only figure visible, upright this time, is that of the glacial Octavius.

That effect- cynically cyclic- is the nearest Mr Gill comes to explicit political comment; kill a dictator and gain an emperor. Robert Flemyng’s Caesar, though, lets you see why he was killed. Mr Flemyng must have a good 30 years on anyone else in the cast, but his career has not included much Shakespeare. So he is liable at first to appear both outmoded and unpractised: caged in mannerisms. But his isolation emphasizes Caesar’s own- physically infirm, but inhumanly brave because afraid to admit to being anything else. Mr Gill has staged the murder superbly- a series of sadistic lunches topped by the victim’s suicidal advance on Brutus’s sword while the heavens belch red smoke- and in dying with a Latin tag on his lips, Mr Flemyng strikes his finest attitude. 

John Shrapnel’s Brutus is another, even richer study in egotism. He argues himself fascinatingly into killing Caesar for fear of what he might do, quizzically spelling out the arguments and then rushing, self-hypnotized, into a murderous conclusion. Brutus himself speaks of his state as ‘a hideous dream’ and this one never really wakes up.

Michael Byrne’s Cassius, apart from a fine early spurt of venom, comes over as a stolid Englishman out of Simon Grey; and John Price’s Antony is little more than vigorous. The finest colouring in the production comes, unexpectedly, from Portia: a brief role into which Lindsay Duncan packs an infinity of poise, anguish and affection. Even in silence she rivets respect. Other performances are adequate if vocally limited. As stagecraft this is Riverside’s finest offering to date.