The Shakespeare Conference: SHK 25.316 Monday, 14 July 2014
From: Hardy M. Cook <
Date: July 12, 2014 at 12:28:35 PM EDT
Subject: Globe Julius Caesar Review: Blood on Their Hands
[Editor’s Note: This review is from the most recent TLS. If you do not have a subscription and would like a copy of the complete review, please email me. –Hardy]
Blood on their hands
Lois Potter
William Shakespeare
Julius Caesar
Shakespeare’s Globe, until October 11
The scene in the foyer of the Globe might make one fear the worst. An actor tries to read a condensed version of The Rape of Lucrece (“by Bacon, or Oxford, or someone, I don’t know”) in competition with noisy actors celebrating the feast of Lupercal with football songs. Meanwhile, the audience inside the theatre sees workmen building a triumphal arch for Caesar’s entry (modelled, the programme says, on one for James I, who entered London on the Ides of March, 1604) and the Lupercalian mob carry their celebration into the theatre itself, shouting for “Caesar!” The tribunes confront them, succeed in shutting them up, and the play begins.
Once it gets everyone’s attention, however, Dominic Dromgoole’s production turns out to be a thoughtful reading of one of Shakespeare’s most thoughtful plays, and one in which groundlings are not encouraged to emulate the bad behaviour of the Roman mob. The play’s basic (and unanswered) question – is it better to leave a strong man in power or to remove him and risk civil war? – has such obvious contemporary relevance that Dromgoole does not need to underline it. The costumes are Elizabethan, with white togas added only for the Senate. I was struck by how much these clothes helped the actors. Dressed like an Elizabethan malcontent rather than a philosopher, Christopher Logan’s waspish Casca could convincingly move from the cynicism of his first scene to the superstitious terror of his second. He was also helped by the production’s emphasis on Roman religion. At the start of the second scene, someone flings down a dead deer and the Lupercal runners dip into its blood, anticipating Antony’s later comparison of the dead Caesar to “a deer, stricken by many princes”. From the start, it is clear that Romans are used to getting blood on their hands.
Dromgoole’s semi-memoir, Will and Me (2006), is absolutely clear about how to play Shakespeare, “keeping it light and fast, and not signposting intentions, just speaking”. This is what we get: the production moves rapidly, with overlapping entrances and exits, and the constant shift of sympathies that is built into the play. George Irving’s mesmerizing Caesar dominates all his scenes. As his procession moves through the yard, the great man presses a purse into the hand of a beggar and the whole crowd shares the recipient’s joy at the arbitrary generosity of the absolute ruler. In some productions Calpurnia is shown to be humiliated when Caesar publicly asks Antony to perform a ritual touching that will make her fertile; here, when Antony does it, she and Caesar embrace, excited about the prospect of a child.
[ . . . ]
The play is designed to let Antony take over at its halfway point. He is not played with hindsight about his future in the still unwritten Antony and Cleopatra – which, perhaps deliberately, opened at the Globe before its predecessor. And this seems right; the two Antonys are differently imagined and this production’s emphasis on living in the moment enables Luke Thompson brilliantly to be both the light-hearted figure of the opening scenes and the heartlessly casual triumvir in the second half of the play. In the Forum scene, his notorious claim, “I am no orator, as Brutus is”, made some spectators laugh, coming as it did after he had whipped up the Romans to a frenzy. Yet it was justified by the hesitant and emotional opening of his speech and by his apparent spontaneity throughout. Only in the few seconds in which he remained onstage alone was there the possibility that he realized what he had done, or even that he had planned it from the start.
[ . . . ]