A Caesar that speaks to today
DIRECTOR ATRI BANERJEE TELLS US ABOUT CASTING WOMEN IN THE
WHAT appeals to you about directing this particular play?
We know it’s a political play, a play that speaks to our politics, speaks to who gets to be a leader, and asks us to think about what you do when you don’t agree with the people in power.
It’s often done in a way that reflects the age it’s being performed in. For example, in the recent production in the Public Theatre in New York Caesar was made to look like Donald Trump. And Shakespeare himself was writing the play at a time when Elizabeth I was coming to the end of her reign. There had been plots against her, and there was a question of who would succeed her. So even in Shakespeare’s day he was using this Roman story to talk about Elizabethan England and what happens when there is a possible power vacuum.
So I wanted to make a production that felt like it could speak about today. I think we live in a world where a series of crises have happened, particularly over the last 7 years, from Brexit, to Trump, the war in Ukraine, the pandemic, events that have revealed the massive rifts we have in our society between class, gender, race, disability, across every intersection of power. I asked myself questions: When you feel like the world is in a bad place, what steps do you actually take to make the world a better place? What are the limits of peaceful activism? How do we react, for example, to the likes of Extinction Rebellion, or the two young women who threw tomato soup at the Van Gogh painting?
What can audiences expect from the production?
I hope they will come away from it asking the questions, What would I do? Would I go as far as to kill someone who is my best friend if I really thought that was going to make the world a better place? The answer is probably no to murder(!), that’s the extremist version of it, but at what point do you glue yourself to Downing Street, at what point do you put yourself in front of a horse like the suffragettes did? We live through waves of political crisis, and activism tries to combat the crisis, but at what point do we resort to violence? In terms of how the production looks, it’s not going to be a production that’s set in Westminster, but neither will it be set in ancient Rome. It will draw on elements of the modern and the ancient world to create our own world really. Taking
influences from impressionist theatre, from choreographers like Pina Bausch, and German theatre to make a world that feels quite stylised and heightened.
I’m also very keen to convey a sense of the supernatural and time running out. The play has ghosts, omens and prophecies. The Soothsayer famously tells Caesar to beware the ideas of March. Characters are always worried about the time, and time running out. That relates to the climate crisis we face: if we don’t act now we will reach the unmanageable temperature for living. It feels to me that Caesar, like the world we live in today, is a play that’s set in a place of emergency. The threat of apocalypse feels very close.
Tell us about the cast you have put together
I want to tell a story about power today. There are 48 named characters in the play, of which 46 are men and two of them are women. So we’ve cast it in such a way to redress the gender imbalance in the play, so it’s about half and half men and women and one non-binary actor. I have cast Brutus and Cassius as women. Yes, I do want the audience to think about their reactions to seeing two women in roles of power. But it’s not just about gender. We’ve got actors who are black, we’ve got actors who are South Asian, we’ve got actors who are disabled, and one non-binary actor. The production will make people think about their reactions to power when it is held by people who aren’t part of the white male patriarchy that we have all been living in.
Can you say something about casting the roles of Brutus and Cassius as women?
The idea to cast Brutus as a woman was there from the beginning. The RSC has never had a female Brutus, and it felt like an opportunity to remodel this play here. For Cassius we auditioned both men and women, and we chose Kelly Gough to play that role in the end. It made sense to do so as part of a broader conversation and interrogation of gender in the play, given that Brutus and Cassius are the two main challengers to the prevailing power system in the play and especially given they operate very differently from one another, which broadens the conversation. And in Thalissa Teixeira, we have Brutus being played by a Black woman, whilst Cassius is being played by a white woman. And that’s providing another way of interrogating these power structures. Yes, they’re both women, but their experiences are so different from each other based on their race in this case. Octavius Caesar is also being played by a Black woman, which adds yet another dimension to this conversation when we think about who takes over, who might be in the next generation.
The show includes a community
chorus. What role will they play?
Julius Caesar is a play about a nation in crisis, a play about the gulf between politicians and the people they are trying to rule. It just makes so much sense to me that this production, which is going on tour, would include ‘real’ people from those areas. So alongside the professional acting company, we have found a way of integrating the communities from all the areas the show is playing.
I wanted to include them to amplify the supernatural, apocalyptic terror within the play.. They will be something akin to the chorus you’d see in a Greek tragedy watching the action. Premonitions of death really. Premotions of figures who embody death in ways that goes beyond these characters.
Julius Caesar runs at the Royal Shakespeare Theatre, Stratfordupon-Avon until April 8. Tickets: rsc.org.uk 01789 331111