Review – Julius Caesar, RSC at the Royal Shakespeare Theatre, Stratford-upon-Avon, 28th March 2023

Posted on March 29, 2023 by therealchrisparkle

Without making it sound like an end of the pier revue, the Royal Shakespeare Company’s summer season kicks off with Atri Banerjee’s production of Julius Caesar. Having started with The Tempest, it’s the second in a series of plays grouped under the theme of Power Shifts, and there’s no doubt that’s highly relevant in these tortuous political times that we’re all facing. I’ve no statistical proof of this, but I think if you got a bunch of Shakespeare devotees in a room together they’d agree that Julius Caesar is one of their favourite offerings from the Great Bard. It’s packed with exciting characters, memorable speeches, impactful incident and more deaths than you can shake a stick at. And it couldn’t be more suited to an examination of power shifting. So it’s a great shame to come away from a production regretting many of its directorial decisions and opportunities lost.

The production is so heavily stylised that it alienates you from the start. Six members of the Community Chorus come on stage, and you think they’re going to sing something passionate and portentous. Instead they give us some heavy breathing like they’re expelling the bad energy at the end of a Vinyasa Yoga session. The rest of the cast come on stage and start running around; after a while they form into a pack and give what I can only describe as an homage to the Michael Jackson Thriller routine. This leads into some chanting (naturally) and Mark Antony starts to howl like a wolf. It’s at this stage that you realise this production is not for purists. The trouble is, if you’ve already lost the goodwill of the crowd by this stage – and Mrs Chrisparkle had already decided that this wasn’t going to be for her – then you’ve got a big uphill struggle trying to get it back.

As you might expect from the Royal Shakespeare Company, there’s an abundance of female actors taking on the traditionally male roles and, despite the odd misplacement of a pronoun here or there, it never seems forced or inappropriate; in fact, it helps gain a new insight into some of the characters. The acting is also first-rate throughout, which really gives purpose to the production. The text is spoken clearly and with conviction; in fact there’s very little that you hear* in this production that doesn’t satisfy even the most pernickety Shakespeare fan. (*One exception, that I’ll return to later.)

No, the problem with the production is with what you see. A blank stage, with a distracting back projection that does little to set the scene. A mishmash of costumes that neither inform us of the status of the characters nor the era in which the play is set. There’s the return of what I think of as the RSC Clock – a ticking countdown that creates a two-minute pause after the death of Caesar – for no discernible reason whatsoever, other than to minimise its impact – and a twenty-minute countdown during the interval. It was the RSC Clock that contributed to the mess that was their Macbeth in 2018, and whilst it’s less damaging here, it’s still a pointless complication. Nothing looks sillier than when a clock ticks down to zero and nothing happens – as at the end of the interval, when at zero hour some people were still queueing for the loo, and it was probably another two minutes of staring at a stopped clock before the play resumed.

Despite a number of deaths, there are no dead bodies – think about that – nor are there are any weapons. Killings are mimed, and there’s lots of semi-balletic prancing around which certainly takes away from death’s sting, but unfortunately looks rather ludicrous. When Brutus kills herself by running onto Lucius’s outstretched hand, it resembles the kind of game you might have enjoyed in the school playground aged seven. And there’s the blood. Being Julius Caesar, there’s an awful lot of it. “Let us bathe our hands in Caesar’s blood,” says Brutus, “…and waving our red weapons o’er our heads, let’s all cry “Peace, freedom, and liberty!””

There’s a clue there – red. So why is the blood in this production black? And it’s not blood-like but a thick gooey gunge that gets on everyone’s hands and clothes; and, of course, with no weapons, Caesar is basically patted to death by messy hands, making the memorable “unkindest cut of all” reference redundant. It’s as though everyone is smeared with molasses; maybe Caesar was diabetic and was killed by a high blood sugar surge.

Let’s not forget the revolving cage of death. As more and more characters get despatched to heaven above, they start to populate a huge cube at the back of the stage. The more people who join them, the happier those already dead seem to be to greet old friends; and I must say, the silly childlike hello wave between Caesar and Brutus is cringeworthy. And the cage revolves; not by some magic stage technology but by two stagehands pushing it around like a broken-down car. Frankly, it’s inelegant and embarrassing.

You may not be surprised to see that the ghetto blaster makes a reappearance, so that Brutus can relax to the tune of Caetano Veloso’s song Nine Out of Ten. I know this because the programme told me. I’d never heard the song before and I’d never heard of Veloso, but I’ll bet my bottom dollar it’s contemporary of neither Roman times nor 1599. When aspects of a production only make sense to the audience after they’ve read a programme note explaining them, there’s something not quite right with the production. It’s a little like trying to wade through T S Eliot’s Waste Land and then turning to his notes in desperation. The programme also explains the reason for the RSC Clock; personally, I think it’s pretty tenuous. Banerjee describes the collaboration between the various cast members which led to the structure of the production as being “quite magical”; whereas to us it felt like it was a production that had been put together by committee. And what I can only describe as being far too clever-clever.

So let’s turn to those show-saving performances. Thalissa Teixeira is superb as Brutus. Noble, honourable (as Mark Antony will tell us) and with a vulnerable compassion that defines her dilemma of being an unwilling conspirator, she gets all the character’s nuances and conveys them with clarity and authority. There’s a terrific balance between her and Kelly Gough’s Cassius; Ms Gough gives us a volatile and excitable reading of the role, emphasising the character’s motivations and emotions with great clarity. And William Robinson is terrific as Mark Antony, slightly wet behind the ears, turning that “tide of man” with a brilliant performance of the Friends Romans Countrymen speech.

The other conspirators are all very well portrayed – Gina Isaac’s Decius Brutus is delightfully deceitful, Matthew Bulgo’s Casca splendidly reserved, and Katie Erich’s Caius Ligarius impressively earnest. Joshua Dunn makes a good job of Cinna the Poet’s untimely death, and there is some light comic relief from Jamal Ajala’s Lucius being made to run on and off the stage ad fatigatum – at least I think it was meant to be comic relief. Annabel Baldwin’s Soothsayer is turned out like they’d just got off the exercise bike at the gym, but nicely delivers their portentous lines with matter-of-fact clarity rather than with Up Pompeii-style wailing.

Nigel Barrett plays Caesar as an atypical military hero; you’d get the sense that he’d rely on his foot soldiers to win any battles, and he appears as a someone more likely to enter a dad dancing contest rather than being a feared General. It’s an interesting reading of the part – not one that I really attuned to, but you can’t win them all.

I was so looking forward to this production; but in the end I was so disappointed with it. To say this is a curate’s egg is to be kind to curates. Worth seeing for the acting, especially Ms Teixeira and Ms Gough’s verbal sparring and Mr Robinson’s oratory. As for the rest, I’ll draw a veil. Julius Caesar is playing at the Royal Shakespeare Theatre until 8^th April, and then goes on a nine date tour until June, to Canterbury, Truro, Bradford, Newcastle, Blackpool, Nottingham, Norwich, York and Salford.

Production photos by Marc Brenner

Two Disappointing For More!

Review – The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time, Derngate, Northampton, 24th March 2015

Posted on March 25, 2015 by therealchrisparkle

Just as Curious Incident (the book) became a must-read on its publication in 2003, Curious Incident (the play) became a must-see after its rave reviews at the National Theatre in 2012. Mrs Chrisparkle and I both read the book and enjoyed it, although we couldn’t recollect much of the story. I’m like that – I can never remember the stories of novels, just the characters. It means I can re-read whodunits dozens of times over and still be surprised at the dénouement; at least I get good value out of a paperback. Late to the party, we finally got round to seeing the stage version last night at the Royal and Derngate, as part of its major 2015 UK and Ireland tour.

When we originally booked, the show was due to run six nights, Monday to Saturday, and we had booked for the first night. A few months ago I received a call from the Box Office saying that the Monday night show had been cancelled as the production team felt they needed longer to get the set in place. Must be some set, I thought. And my word was I right. From the moment you walk into the auditorium to be greeted by Mrs Shears’ German Shepherd with a garden fork plunged through its heart, looking for all the world like some hors d’oeuvres for a Pantomime Giant, it’s hard to imagine a more inventive, contemporary, artistic and indeed scientific set than Bunny Christie’s mind-blowing grid of circuitry and cupboards that constantly comes to life with its own lighting and projections. Even the props that continually emerge from the walls are indivisible from the set as well. Every so often in the first act our hero Christopher would magically produce from inside the walls of the set another handful of toy train tracks and start laying them down on the floor, together with all the attributes of a great train set – stations, passengers, flower beds, signal boxes – even Big Ben and the London Eye. The way they all come together at the end of the first act is simply a joy to behold. A seamless bond between set and props – true stagecraft.

But I’m ahead of myself. I’m sure you know what The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time is all about, but here’s a quick summary. Fifteen year old Christopher has unspecified behavioural problems most closely related to Asperger Syndrome. This makes it very hard for him to understand the meanings behind what people say as he takes everything very literally. For example, if he was simply told to “stop talking”, he would never know when it would be acceptable for him to start talking again, because that vital information wasn’t provided. He cannot bear to be touched; he cannot cope with large amounts of visual information coming at him from all angles; he has a tendency towards incontinence under stress and won’t use a stranger’s toilet. He’s also an incredibly gifted mathematician and he finds it impossible to tell a lie. His behavioural problems get him into occasional trouble with the police due to his tendency to lash out when they’re asking him questions. But Christopher is a highly moral young chap, and so when he discovers that Mrs Shears’ dog has been murdered, he sets about finding out whodunit, and writing it up in the form of a novel – the novel entitled The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time in fact. By sleuth and sneakiness he discovers that his mother did not die in hospital of a heart attack, as his father had previously told him, but had in fact run off with Mr Shears and was living in Willesden Green. He can’t bear his father’s lies, so heads off to find his mother. But this is biting off way more than he can chew (which is a phrase Christopher simply wouldn’t understand, as he’s not biting or chewing anything). How far will he get?

Simon Stephens’ adaptation of the novel for the stage rises to the challenge of how to turn a quirky novel into a quirky play. Just as Mark Haddon’s original book had, as its premise, the fact that the book was actually written by Christopher himself, so Mr Stephens’ play also is assumed to be written by Christopher, which gives rise to a few “play within a play” moments, when some of the characters come out of context and deal with its authorship. Nowhere is this more amusingly realised than with the epilogue, which is definitely worth waiting thirty seconds or so in your seat after what appears to be the end of the show. Actually it astounded me by revealing how much geometry and algebra I genuinely remember from school! If all this sounds teasing and tantalising, there are so many moments of visual delight and inventiveness in the entire show that I don’t want to spoil them for you. This is like a multimedia experience – there are so many different ways to enjoy it.

At the heart of this production is a simply superb performance by Joshua Jenkins as Christopher. There aren’t many roles that require you to run the gamut from A-Z as the old saying goes, but this is one. His abrupt mood and tone changes throughout the show, for example going from self-assured detective to bawling infant in a split second, take place with consummate ease. His struggle to cope with his train ride to Willesden is painful to watch as he fights off all the visual and oral stimuli that are hurled at him. One minute he’s sullen and moody, and the next he’s gawping with pleasure at the arrival of an Andrex puppy (as indeed are the entire audience). You never feel like he’s an actor playing a role; you really feel he is Christopher, coping with the world in the best way he can. Totally credible throughout; an amazing performance.

There’s a moving and sensitive performance by Stuart Laing as Ed, his father, supportive of his son but driven to distraction by him too; his attempts at discipline are usually not worth the fight and he’s clearly reticent about making bad situations worse. There are a few very tender moments when he just watches Christopher in awed silence, not quite believing that he could have a son this remarkable. As a balance, there’s a lovely spirited performance by Gina Isaac as Judy, Christopher’s mother, something of what the Dowager Mrs Chrisparkle would have called “a good-time girl”, but also deeply caring for her son, and the semi-reconciliation that occurs between the two parents is heart-warming to observe. Geraldine Alexander gives a lovely performance as Siobhan, Christopher’s school teacher and mentor, with the perfect mixture of friendliness and professionalism that you would have to maintain in order to do that job correctly.

The rest of the cast form an ensemble around the character of Christopher, and give great support; to pick out a few, I really liked Clare Perkins as the Headmistress who always repeats the sentences that Siobhan has previously narrated – a very funny running joke; Roberta Kerr as the elderly neighbour Mrs Alexander who really wants to befriend Christopher except that he won’t let her in; John McAndrew as the “too old” Reverend Peters; and Lucas Hare as the wretched Roger Shears who hopes Judy ditches her rediscovered son as quickly as possible. The ensemble work is powerful and thought-provoking; I loved the balletic, physical theatre-type moves between the actors and Christopher as he floats and bounces off them in various dream sequences; members of the ensemble even take on the roles of doors, latches, windows, and so on in order to accentuate the physical achievement of Christopher successfully negotiating an ordinary day. There’s a great moment when Christopher is lifted on his side so that he can walk along the sides of the walls – not seen anything like that since Bert did his gravity-defying dancing in Mary Poppins. The whole thing is magic to watch.

Despite the large numbers of children in the audience – this is now a set text in schools – this is far from being a “children’s play”. There’s an appropriate amount of bad language in it, considering the level of stress that some of the characters face, and it deals with some difficult subjects like broken relationships, lies, and challenging behaviour. But it’s extremely funny and creates a fantastic dramatic environment where we see the world through the eyes of one unique individual. A memorable theatrical experience that ought to be compulsory viewing for everyone! The tour continues throughout the UK and Ireland till November.