Reviews 2009
Reviews 2009
✭✭✩✩✩
by William Shakespeare, directed by James MacDonald
Stratford Festival, Avon Theatre, Stratford
June 6-October 31, 2009
"Thumbs Down"
The Stratford Festival’s seventh production of “Julius Caesar” was easily the worst show of the six that debuted during the Festival’s opening week. Fine performances in two central roles are overwhelmed by poor to mediocre performances in all the others, dreadful design and uninspired direction. The Festival may have put “Shakespeare” back into its official name, but on the evidence of Des McAnuff’s “Macbeth” and this “Caesar”, the Festival has to relearn how how to stage the plays of its namesake playwright.
The first difficulty audiences will encounter with this new “Caesar” is its off-putting design. Director James MacDonald emphasizes how universal the questions of the play are concerning the rights and wrongs of assassinating a tyrant, and the designs he approved by Davis Boechler are clearly meant to underscore this universality. Yet in mixing ancient and modern, East and West, all they create is a bizarre, disharmony that alienates us from the action. The Roman senators wear modern Western business suits except that between the jacket and the shirt, Boechler adds a shin-length Indian kurta with a pleat and asymmetrical front to create an allusion to the Roman toga falling beneath the jacket. Over the jacket they wear a diplomatic sash. On other occasions they wear an embroidered shawani over the kurta.
If Boechler had followed through on this idea, there would be little to complain of except that the conspirators, in only their kurtas and hard shoes, look like a fraternity of nerds in nightshirts. Calphurnia and Portia are in what seem to be 1960s party dresses with high heels. The Roman mob are in everyday 21st-century garb. To disguise themselves the conspirators wear Venetian tricorns and masks. The Soothsayer is a legless 1960s hippie. When we move into the battle scenes of the second act, the rebel forces under Brutus and Cassius are in modern grey-toned camouflage suits with engineer caps while their commanders wear long padded trench-coats and ball-caps. The strangest turn comes when Octavius‘ soldiers enter looking like black, ant-shaped robots from some sci-fi movie. The questions “Where are we?” and When is this?” quickly shift from puzzling to incomprehensible.
Here Boechler’s set designs only compound the problem. If the action is really set everywhere and anytime, why, then, do we see Octavius and Mark Antony walking on a map of the Roman Empire circa 44bc, projected onto a screen? Why, if we are in Rome or in a universal everywhere is it snowing on and off during the battle scenes? Rather than illuminating text of character, the design sets up a barrier between us and the play.
Some actors can give fine performances no matter what their surroundings. Gearing Wyn Davies is excellent as Caesar. He conveys the man’s pride and arrogance through carriage and gesture. The fact that he is so aware of his own charisma makes clear why he should inspire both envy and flattery. Ben Carlson relates Brutus directly to both Macbeth and Hamlet, two characters he has played for whom Brutus seems like an early sketch. Like Hamlet he debates whether to act of not to act. Like Macbeth he is haunted by the consequences of his deeds. Unlike either, he is an idealist torn between two unpalatable options the political world offers, either of which will lead to his ruin. Carlson, intelligence informing every word of his crystal clear diction, manages better than anyone I’ve seen to carry Brutus tragedy fully to its conclusion. He makes Brutus’ remark, “Thou seest the world, Volumnius, how it goes” into the same insight Hamlet and Macbeth have in acknowledging the unavoidability of fate.
Compared to Wyn Davies and Carlson, the rest of the cast seem tired and disheartened. Tom Rooney’s Cassius is perfunctory and weak. Rooney hardly mines the complexities of the part such as the role calculation and envy play in Cassius‘ hatred of Caesar. Jonathan Goad does not give us Mark Anthony the master politician since he is unable to convey two emotions at the same time. We see his anger at the conspirators before and after his famous speech, but where is it during the speech, not to mention the self-congratulatory sense he has of his own power?
The only two women in the play, Calphurnia and Portia, have the function of foreseeing danger for their husbands, Caesar and Brutus, which the men reject as female irrationality. The scenes are so similar a director ought to heighten their differences, but MacDonald stages them exactly the same way. Yanna McIntosh gives Calphurnia more gravitas than Cara Ricketts gives Portia, but that is the only difference. Ricketts ought to give some hint of Portia’s mental fragility, given Portia’s gruesome mode of suicide, but does not.
Few of the many Roman senators and soldiers make any impression. Two exceptions are Michael Spencer-Davis as Casca (incorrectly spelled as “Caska” in the programme) and Dion Johnstone as Octavius Caesar. Spencer-Davis, sounding like an aging dandy, makes the account of Caesar’s refusal of the coronet three times quite funny by using a snide tone of voice, thus providing a rare streak of humour in an otherwise earnest drama. MacDonald really should make more of Johnstone, who gives Octavius an appropriately aloof manner. It would be helpful if MacDonald allowed Johnstone to indicate that Octavius already has doubts about Mark Antony to foreshadow their future relationship in “Antony and Cleopatra”.
The main flaw in MacDonald’s pedestrian direction is that he is unable to generate any sense of urgency or tension in the action, rather odd given that the subject is a political assassination. In large part this is due to his clunky, deliberate pacing and an over-reliance on the more dissonant passages of Alfred Schnittke’s music to do the work for him. It doesn’t help that the fight scenes staged by Daniel Levinson are among the least convincing I’ve ever seen at Stratford. Mark Antony’s famous oration ought to be stirring, but we ought not to worry that the block of marble he is standing on hasn’t been secured to the stage. MacDonald follows what is now a cliché in directing this scene by having the mob spread out into the audience. Unfortunately, their shouting and chanting so close to our ears often drown out Mark Antony’s words from the stage.
MacDonald also does not pay close attention to flaws in Shakespeare’s text. In Act 4, scene 2, Brutus tells Cassius that Portia is dead. A few lines later Messala enters and tells Brutus the news from Rome that Portia is dead. The double report is a well-known error in the text of the play which was prepared from the prompt-books rather than Shakespeare’s manuscript. The best way to solve the problem is to omit Messala’s report. But MacDonald leaves it in and has Carlson react as if it’s common knowledge that the news from Rome is always out of date, an unwanted note of comedy in what should be a key demonstration of Brutus’ stoicism.
One admires the work of Wyn Davies and Carlson in valiantly giving their best, but ultimately their efforts alone cannot raise up a production sinking under the weight of murky ideas in design and direction.
©Christopher Hoile
Note: This review is a Stage Door exclusive
Photo: Ben Carlson and Geraint Wyn Davies. ©David Hou.
2009-07-17
Julius Caesar