A persuasive and poignant Caesar
Sheffield Crucible Julius Caesar
Just as last year you couldn’t move for Lears, right now there are an awful lot of Caesars. The RSC’S period-dress revival is at Stratford, while Ben Whishaw is soon to play Brutus in Nick Hytner’s yet-to-open new theatre The Bridge. Ivo van Hove and Phyllida Lloyd recently revived their versions of Shakespeare’s most political tragedy, and now Robert Hastie, in his inaugural production as head of Sheffield Theatres, makes the case that this play, with its shrewd interrogation of the link between democracy and sophistry, is the Shakespeare we need to see.
For the most part, he does so persuasively, with a production that’s firmly plugged into the play’s civic setting. Ben Stones’s stage design loosely evokes a modern, presidentialstyle debating chamber but Hastie’s show is just as much about the streets as the senate. Those streets heave with all the tawdry pomp of an election campaign. The Romans, that volatile mob whose allegiance turns on a dime, and played by members of Sheffield People’s Theatre, heckle from the auditorium like fans on the terraces. The Soothsayer is a rather wretched looking young woman clutching a baby. When, in the tempestuous aftermath of Mark Antony’s funeral speech (delivered with unctuous sincerity by an emotionally febrile Elliot Cowan), the crowd kick to death an innocent man, the parallels with modern politicians who clothe irresponsible rhetoric in patriotic sentiment hum in the air.
The temptation with Julius Caesar is to play it as a political thriller; Hastie’s wordy, dimly lit production goes the other way. The mood is melancholic, even elegiac. Richard Taylor’s brooding electronic soundtrack is the sound of a storm about to break. Samuel West, back on stage as an unusually scholarly Brutus at the theatre he once ran, cuts an appealingly introspective, anguished figure prone to philosophising when his co-conspirators might prefer a bit of action. Zoe Waites offers a great foil as a female Cassius in slick suit and heels, and lending a fierce frisson of gender politics to the bitter relationship between Cassius and Jonathan Hyde’s Caesar, who oozes patrician entitlement.
Yet West’s performance, seen on the final preview, was not quite the finished article. Worse, he was afflicted by a serious case of the mumbles. Elsewhere, a general sluggishness infected this show to varying degrees. Put it down to pre-press night nerves: Hastie’s production shows every sign of sharpening up. The final, dystopian flavoured scenes, as Brutus picks his way through a wrecked debating chamber, scattered with papers and twisted metal insignia, to the sound of a distant flapping bird, are flooded with real poignancy. There are no victors here.