julius caesar
Stratford festival
national post

Maybe in the long historical view, the murder of Julius Caesar in the Roman Capitol can be seen as one of those funny things that happened on the way to the Forum. Maybe that's why the Stratford Festival has programmed both the musical and Shakespeare's play in the same season and in the same theatre. Otherwise, it might seem perverse of Stratford to place so public and declamatory a piece on the Avon stage, flat and enclosed even by proscenium standards, rather than on the open epic platform of the Festival Theatre itself.

As things turn out, it is perverse. James Macdonald's production delivers the play only in fits and starts, the fragments scattered across David Boechler's first-act set, which is mostly composed of the kind of steps you find leading up to the entrance of museums. It may be meant to supply grandeur, but it just looks cluttered and murky. Post-intermission, when the story moves away from Rome and towards the battlefield, the structure has been reduced to rubble. This must be one of the few productions of Caesar whose second half looks better than its first. Not that much better, though: This is a modern-dress production, and when we get to the battles they seem like the poor relations of those in this season's Macbeth. The personal and political conflicts in this Caesar seem no more urgent with the actors in suits and uniforms than if they were decked out in togas. Maybe less.

This is especially frustrating considering the calibre of the leading performances. The main problem with producing Caesar today is that of finding three actors with the brains, chops and charisma to carry off the co- equal roles of Brutus, Cassius and Antony. A fourth to play Caesar himself isn't as necessary, but is certainly nice. It hardly ever happens, but this time it does. Ben Carlson captures all the ambiguities of Brutus, the "honourable murderer" who kills to preserve a republic and ends by enabling an empire. Once primed, he's decisive (and incisive), but makes all the wrong decisions (and incisions). Carlson makes him priggish, certainly, but not pompous. He addresses the Roman crowd with the passionate faith in logic of a Barack Obama: He gets away with it, too, until his opponent, Antony, turns out to have the manipulative skills of a talk-show host.

The quarrel's a great autonomous scene, but there's a gap in the way it's set up that the production doesn't manage to fill. It presupposes a personal bond between the two men that the play never has time to set up; they're too busy plotting. Tom Rooney's Cassius is a feverish, vulnerable compound of opportunism and conviction; it's a less complete performance than Carlson's, technically and psychologically, but I applaud an actor intelligent enough to say "we petty men," rather then "we petty men." Jonathan Goad has a disconcerting habit of shouting, even when he's on his own, but otherwise his Antony is the perfect popular orator: the more dangerous because he believes his own stuff. Geraint Wyn-Davies' Caesar, as vain as he's powerful, is a great enigma, which is a compliment.

However, the fine individual performances don't cohere into relationships; the actors keep having to jump guns. Some cuts get in their way; so do some awkward choices. The veiled antagonism, brilliantly taut in the text, between the too-confident Antony and the coming man Octavius (one of the great small roles) is muffed. The crowd that becomes a mob isn't believable in either mood or from any period, for the forum orations they're placed among us, ad-libbing in our ears but with their real, crucial reactions out of focus. There's a new character billed as Soothsayer's Girlfriend, rather a specialized job description and one she doesn't seem to take very seriously since she's away from her partner, a cripple in a go-cart, in his scene of greatest need. More importantly, his lowly position means that when he gives Caesar his straight-up tip about the ides of March, the two can't make eye contact. So another key moment goes. The play remains locked behind its picture frame.

Very flat, the Avon.