Julius Caesar RSC Saturday 8th April 2023

This is to theatre what Penn and Teller are to magic. We are shown the working. We start as if watching the warm up exercises of a rehearsal and then, cast dressed in ordinary clothes, they breathe out a historical drama.

Gender is fluid. Disability is normal and included. The musical and FX director appears on small screens. That music is brooding industrial ambient with spells of louder noise and rarer tuneful noise. Occasionally a guitarist, trombonist and vocalist climb onto the black obelisk upstage (pictured). A smoke machine is used. Ides and portents are personalised. Blood is black (but sometimes actor’s shadows have a red tinge). After the stabbing a two minute countdown on big screen tells us how long JC will spend dying. Later the same counter is used for the interval. Back projection on that screen is full of incomplete images, at one point showing us bits of Caesar’s body from strange angles and extreme close-up. I called to mind the opening credits of Se7en. Other images are brooding but also occasionally pastoral.

In part two colour, until then only sported by the country-accented narrator, is used in the place of the dead, the bodies stacking up in a pen like discarded chess pieces, no longer wearing black and white. Occasionally they haunt.

That black blood. It stains the white stage, despite stage-hands on a fervent interval cleaning regime, and the cast. All are infected like in the old TV infomercial about germs. Power corrupts all around it. In the old evangelical sermon on sin, it spoils. It spreads. It stains. Everyone has black blood on their hands and clothes by the end.

And the murder? Step by step we are drawn into the plot. If Caesar is as they say he is he has to go. No other way out. Except the Caesar we have been watching isn’t like that. Not dictatorial. The asides say he refuses the trappings of power.

I did this play at school over 50 years ago. I’d never been back, the class read-round spoiling it for ever. Well, not quite ever. Thanks RSC.

Other reviews (linked after) will have more to say about the acting, which I'll leave to them. In any event the regular actors were not all available for the show we saw and my increasing deafness did the cast no favours.

This is the RSC debut by Director Atri Banerjee. Some people have buried this woke Shakespeare. I praise it. More please.

Links:

RSC web-site

Guardian Review

Warwickshire World Review