A TASTE OF CAESAR
A fresh spin on emperor’s Rome focuses on the women behind key characters
Portia’s Julius Caesar
★★★ 1/2 (out of 4) Written by Kaitlyn Riordan and William Shakespeare, directed by Eva Barrie. Until Sept. 3 in Withrow Park, 725 Logan Ave. Shakespeareintheruff.com.
There’s a great deal of energy these days in anglophone theatre circles around women and Shakespeare, and we’ve written about this a lot in the Star. Most of the recent interventions with Shakespeare’s plays by GTA companies have involved casting traditionally male roles with female actors. Why Not Theatre’s Prince Hamlet, returning to Canadian Stage next February, pushed things further by scrambling gender, ethnicity and how language is communicated (its Horatio is deaf and speaks in ASL).
Shakespeare in the Ruff is making another important intervention, this one avowedly feminist, with Portia’s Julius
Caesar, a new-old play written by the company’s artistic director, Kaitlyn Riordan, in collaboration with ... someone named William Shakespeare. As with other Canadian adaptations of the Bard, such as Djanet Sears’
Harlem Duet and Ann-Marie
MacDonald’s Goodnight Desdemona (Good Morning Juliet), Riordan centres women’s experience and female actors in a tradition that has always sidelined them.
More so than either of these writers, Riordan (working with dramaturgs Andrew Joseph Richardson and Eva Barrie) interweaves her own voice into Shakespeare’s, and quite suc- cessfully. The play tells the recognizable story of Julius Caesar, but from the perspective of the wives of the central characters: Christine Horne plays Brutus’s wife Portia, and Nikki Duval Caesar’s spouse Calpurnia. To underline the central theme of motherhood, Riordan has invented a new character, Servilia (Deborah Drakeford) — Brutus’s mother, who, echoing Coriolanus’s Volumnia, competes with her daughter-in-law for her son’s attention.
Half the script is Riordan’s own writing; the other is drawn from 17 Shakespeare plays, including Julius Caesar, four sonnets and a poem. Her achievement in weaving this all together so it comes across as a single — and credibly Elizabethan — voice is considerable (though including a few very recognizable lines from other plays such as Hamlet’s “cleft my heart in twain” drew me unwillingly out of the immediate experience).
First and foremost, this is a gripping yarn, and the capacity of director Barrie, the 11-person cast and the design team to keep the tension and energy high in the outdoor setting of Withrow Park for a nearly two-hour running time is remarkable. This risks heresy, but part of the excitement of this play for me was not knowing what was going to happen next, as those familiar with Shakespeare inevitably do in traditional stagings.
For me, the heart of the production is a series of scenes between Portia and Calpurnia, here played as dear friends supporting each other as the former copes with new motherhood (Horne plays most of her scenes with a prop baby strapped to her chest, and powerfully conveys the character’s emotional and physical exhaustion) and Calpurnia with her incapacity to conceive. Their conversations are about their own struggles and their concerns for their city: the personal and the political merge.
From Servilia’s perspective, the way to effect change is to influence husbands behind the scenes. Both Portia and Calpurnia attempt this, and the former goes further in trying to directly intervene in the plot against Caesar. Along with these three central characters, Casca is played as a woman (Tahirih Vejdani), and Riordan slyly drops another of Shakespeare’s mem- orable female characters into the mix (it’d be spoiling to name her, but let’s just say she’s from Egypt). All of them undertake different strategies to gain agency.
Because this is set up so well, Calpurnia’s angry cry against their eventual inability to be heard — “We are Cassandras all!” — cuts deep. Duval plays Calpurnia from the heart and gut, and the connection between her and Horne is palpable and moving.
Along with portraying the leading male characters, four male actors (Kwaku Okyere, Adriano Sobretodo Jr., Giovanni Spina and Jeff Yung) play a chorus of washer women, all speaking in accented English. The implication that they represent Rome’s immigrant underclass subtly adds a level of ethnic and class politics to the play’s critique, though the farcical nature of their costuming and playing veers distractingly, at points, into Monty Python territory.
The use of a chorus (Troy Sarju, Sienna Singh and Jahnelle Jones-Williams) to literalize the sound of Portia’s baby crying by tingling on musical triangles is an effective and at times chilling touch. Barrie uses the depth of the park setting very effectively, holding actors in tableaux behind the action at crucial points (set and costume design is by Rachel Forbes). With only a few instruments, Jareth Li creates clear distinctions between night and day, interior and exterior, through his lighting.
Drawing on Shakespeare and adding her own creativity, Riordan has written a play for today.