Hail an Intriguing Caesar

julius caesar
the alchemy theatre
the national post

The Alchemy Theatre, a small-scale operation specializing in the classics (which seems, in practice, to mean just Shakespeare), offers a Julius Caesar that is most successful with the funeral scene in the Forum. This, considering the lack of resources, may appear surprising, but in fact the enforced economy here works better than many other productions' half-hearted attempts at spectacle. Half a dozen actors, clustered in the auditorium wearing beaked masks, make an excellent symbolic crowd, and their few spoken lines function as they should: as brilliant shorthand for the shifting emotions of a crowd.

Brutus (Kyle McDonald) unpacks his oration with logic, and with a palpable self-satisfaction in that logic. Antony (Chris Cocoluzzi) then wipes him off the popular radar with a delivery of the "friends, Romans, countrymen" speeches that superbly blends genuine passion over Caesar's death with a ruthless skill in manipulating his own and his hearers' emotions. I really didn't want him to stop. Alone in the cast, he has a real sense of pace. Even more important, the rhythms of his speech match those of the character's thoughts. He is less successful in his subsequent scenes, in which it seems the actor rather than the character is dangerously pleased with himself.

Brutus is played with intentional smugness, which is justifiable up to a point, but should not constitute the whole performance. Signs of humanity -- toward his wife or his page -- are ruthlessly obliterated, or maybe were not noticed in the first place. True, this is a political play from which nobody comes out well -- an honest political play, in other words -- but the characters are complex men, not bugs.

Simon Michellepis's nondescript production hardly lives up to his company's high-sounding slogan ("Classical Theatre for the Modern Mind"). It consists of lines spoken more or less intelligently but without much depth, and of bodies shunted rather awkwardly around a confined space.

The black drapes, off-the-peg togas and inexperienced cast are all economically understandable, but they take a toll. So does the textual editing that has the minor conspirators, an ignoble bunch, returning as Brutus's and Cassius's staff officers, who are the opposite. (And, in one case, commit suicide to prove it.) The most ingenious rewriting is applied to Casca, the number-three conspirator and, textually, the number-one assassin. In this version he doesn't get to stab Caesar in the back or anywhere else, but he does change sides, ending up as one of those men whom nobody likes.

Still, that central scene is really exciting, far more so than it usually is. Or perhaps I should say than it used to be, because Julius Caesar, in theory one of the most popular plays and one of those we all studied in school, is these days hardly ever done. I don't know why it's slipped so far down the charts. It's certainly not for lack of relevance. I think it's because of all the tragedies it offers the least scope for sex and violence. Or anyway for sex.