This is what you’d get if Lord Sugar’s lot went after Caesar!
Julius Caesar (Royal Shakespeare Theatre, Stratford and touring)
Verdict: Rookie Romans ★★✩✩✩
Berlusconi (Southwark Playhouse Elephant, London)
Verdict: Ignoblest Roman ★✩✩✩✩
WHO was the noblest Roman of them all? From Julius Caesar to Silvio Berlusconi, the eternal city has had more than its fair share of contenders vying for the title of il grande formaggio.
Now that competition is ignited all over again, thanks to a touring revival of Shakespeare’s tragedy opening in Stratford, and a musical spoof about the disgraced media mogul in Southwark.
Julius Caesar at the RSC is the more curious offering, throwing as it does a cast of rookies and debutantes to the lions in another solemnly PC vision of the Bard.
Director Atri Banerjee presents the dog-eat-dog — or cat-eat-Christian — world of Ancient Rome as a marvellously inclusive and diverse democracy. Here, the conspirators who join forces against the supposed ambition of chubby, middle-aged Caesar (Nigel Barrett) are modish lesbian millennials.
It’s as though a godlike Alan Sugar had set up a version of The Apprentice and given a team of factious young hopefuls the task of going forth to nail Caesar.
Rising to the challenge, Kelly Gough is a ferocious Cassius. Like a rugby prop forward, she puts her shoulder to Shakespeare’s oratorical verse to shove Thalissa Teixeira’s long, languid Brutus into leading a conspiracy against Caesar. Sadly, though, Teixeira remains stubbornly lovely and decisively vague. Perhaps that’s because she is enjoying a perfect life with her vibrant wife, Portia.
Given that she tells us she loves Caesar ( platonically), she is motivated to kill him only for the honour of terminating his ambition. Today, alas, honour is an anachronism and ambition a moral positive — so we are left with an ideological vacuum, with little reason for the conspirators to risk their cosy utopia of diversity and inclusivity.
It might have helped if William Robinson, as their rival Mark Antony, was more of a nasty fascist instead of an equally sensitive millennial.
And, with the exception of Nadi Kemp-Sayfi’s emotionally modulated Portia, overemphatic diction all but destroys Shakespeare’s nuances, ironies and moods.
Rosanna Vize’s staging looks cool, with a huge rotating cube housing an olive tree and allowing arty projections that also crowbar in an obscure environmental message. Inscrutably allied to this is the use of oil instead of fake blood, and an atomic clock counting down time.
And there is arresting music from Jasmin Kent Rodgman, which combines primal wails, throbbing drums and cacophonous brass.
What’s missing from this impeccably PC, orderly and odourless production is a sense of chaos. For that we must look to Shakespeare’s grammar, expurgated throughout and reaching its nadir in the bathos of Mark Antony’s verdict on Brutus: ‘She is an honourable man.’
■ AS MANY women know to their cost, Silvio Berlusconi needs to be handled with care. So too, I fear, does this witless and generic new bio-musical, Berlusconi, opening Southwark Playhouse’s new third venue.
The chaotic tone of Ricky Simmonds and Simon Vaughan’s show, which is nigh on three hours long, is poorly judged, inviting us to laugh at the clownish ways of the fraudster famed for throwing ‘ bunga bunga’ sex parties at his villa, but also claiming to lament the fate of the women whose lives he poisoned.
Nor is there much Italian about the very Anglo- Saxon rock score, which could indeed be from the opera Berlusconi himself is writing, in one of the show’s unfunny running jokes.
James Grieve’s cramped production crams the narrow stage with a marble precipice emulating the steps to the Italian parliament. He thereby reduces choreography to marching on the spot and arm-waving.
And could he not at least have found a Berlusconi who was short, fat and bald, instead of the tall, thin Sebastien Torkia, with his fecund locks?
In a crowded field that includes Nero and the Borgias, the fourtime former Italian Prime Minister was surely one of the ignoblest Romans of them all. And now he has a musical to match.