✭✭✩✩✩

by William Shakespeare, directed by Scott Wentworth

Stratford Festival, Festival Theatre, Stratford

August 16-October 27, 2018

Antony: “Mischief, thou art afoot,

Take thou what course thou wilt!” (Act 3, Scene 2)

The Stratford Festival’s latest Julius Caesar is handsome but rather sleepy production.  Shakespeare’s play tends to fall off in intensity after Caesar’s assassination and Mark Antony’s funeral oration, but here even the first half only sporadically comes to life.  The reason for this is not the gender-blind casting which sees women in such roles as Caesar, Cassius, Mark Antony and Octavius.  Rather, director Scott Wentworth is unable to infuse the Festival’s eighth production of the play with excitement while his faulty concept for the production only causes confusion.

Among students, Julius Caesar is known for its many anachronisms.  Shakespeare, as was common at the time, imagines ancient Rome to be much like his contemporary London and so mentions that the Romans wear hats and doublets and features a clock striking the hour.  (The notion of historically accurate dress on stage did not arise until the late 18th century.)  Wentworth has found a way to negate these anachronisms by having designer Christina Poddubiuk dress the Romans as they would likely appear on the 17th-century English stage.  The aristocracy wear hose, breeches, doublets and caps or hats with a large diagonal length of cloth as a token reference to the toga.  

The most notable aspect of Poddubiuk’s costumes is that the Roman conspirators are clad as English Puritans – all in black with white ruffs and capotains, i.e. tall hats that look like truncated cones.  Through this design Wentworth associates the conspirators who kill the would-be king Caesar to preserve the Roman republic with the members of the Puritan Revolution in England who executed Charles I in 1649 and established a republic, the Commonwealth of England.  The problem is that the parallel between the two periods only extends to pro-republican groups killing an existing leader.  In Rome the assassination of Caesar was to preserve Rome as a republic, while in England it was to transform England into a republic.  In Rome the assassination failed in its goal, while in England a republic was established that lasted twenty years.  The English parallel is thus more confusing than helpful. 

A further consequence of dressing all the Roman aristocracy as Puritans is that they are covered in black from neck to toe and wear black hats.  Only the face is a distinguishing characteristic, and even with gender-blind casting it becomes difficult to tell who is who among the nineteen identically clad characters.

Confusion caused by the concept only exacerbates the uneven performances of the cast.  Though Julius Caesar (100-44bc) may be the title character, most fans of Shakespeare know that it is Brutus who is really the central figure of the play.  Brutus’s attempt to participate in an assassination for the greater good of Rome while still maintaining his reputation for honour is the main crux of the drama. 

The current production suffers a major blow from the lacklustre performance of Jonathan Goad as Brutus.  Why this should be after his fine performance as Atticus Finch in To Kill a Mockingbird this same season is a mystery.  Brutus is meant to be riven by a deep internal conflict over whether assassinating Caesar is morally justified or not, but Goad shows us only a generalized discomfort.  Even in Act 4 when Brutus learns of his wife Portia’s death, Goad barely seems to register the fact. 

Because of Goad’s curiously unengaged performance, our interest shifts to the vitally urgent performance of Irene Poole as Cassius, so much so that the play feels much more like the tragedy of Cassius than of Brutus.  Poole exudes an intensity that simply eludes Goad.  Her Cassius is absolutely convinced that Rome is in danger if Caesar becomes king and portrays to Brutus in the most strenuous terms why assassination is the only answer.  Brutus’s wavering is meant to show his moral scruples, but here Poole’s Cassius is so strong in his convictions that Goad’s Brutus, by comparison, merely seems weak .  Though Shakespeare focusses on Brutus’s suicide, here Cassius’ is so powerful that Brutus’s feels like a pale imitation.

Seana McKenna plays Caesar as an enigma.  He is self-possessed and already given to imperial gestures and demeanour, yet never appears as the absolute villain the conspirators make him out to be.  From what we hear, Caesar is guilty of ambition, but from what we see he is most guilty of pride, though McKenna manifests this mostly as a type of stony humourlessness.

Mark Antony is a central role.  In his famous funeral oration over Caesar’s body Shakespeare demonstrates why the the word “mob” derives from the Latin mobile vulgus meaning “fickle commoners”.  Having just agreed with everything that Brutus has said to justify the assassination of Caesar, Mark Antony, in a masterpiece of oratory, is meant to sway the mob against Brutus and the conspirators while still claiming to praise them.  Unfortunately, Michelle

Giroux, whose Mark Antony walks like female fashion model on the runway, delivers the oration as a carefully spoken poem rather than a calculated, incendiary speech.  She speaks in such smooth, soothing tones it’s impossible to see why the mob reacts with such violence to her words.  Worse, there is no give and take between the speaker and the mob to show when Mark Antony recognizes he has ignited a fire and how he proceeds to fan its flames. 

The play has a huge array of minor characters, but several stand out.  There is the pedantic and frightened Cinna the Poet of Randy Hughson and the tough, swaggering Octavius Caesar of Sophia Walker.  Jacklyn Francis as Caesar’s wife Calpurnia and Monice Peter as Brutus’s wife Portia are both so sympathetic because of their nobility of spirit it is hard to see how their husbands can so easily disregard their advice.  Déjah Dixon-Green is very moving as Pindarus, Cassius’ servant, who is so faithful he even helps his master commit suicide.  Marion Adler, though primarily a member of the nameless mob, is so forceful and vociferous she practically becomes its de facto leader.

The most notable aspect of Wentworth’s production its gender-blind casting, where at least half the roles of the heavily male dramatis personae are played by women.  Wentworth has done done this because he thinks it will help bring out Shakespeare’s intent.  As he says in his Director’s Notes, “I believe that in Julius Caesar, Shakespeare – whose own queen had to rule on masculine principles – is calling into question the whole nature of what we now call patriarchy”.  Given that Shakespeare’s plays were written for an all-male troupe and for a predominantly male audience, this interpretation ascribes the Bard too modern a worldview. 

Wentworth’s interpretation also assumes that women have the exclusive preserve of certain virtues.  He writes, “Such feminine attributes as cooperation and care for the future, and the idea of strength through sharing, are still regarded with suspicion in public life”.  We need only look at characters such as Margaret in Henry VI, Parts 2 and 3, Tamara in Titus Andronicus, Lady Macbeth, The Queen in Cymbeline or Volumnia in Coriolanus, currently playing this season, to realize that some of Shakespeare’s most powerful women do not share what Wentworth quaintly calls “feminine attributes”.

If casting women in Julius Caesar is supposed to bring home Shakespeare’s critique of patriarchy, why does Wentworth direct the women to play their parts as if they were men?  Most of the female actors are so good at playing men that the production’s overall effect is really no different than if it had been traditionally cast.  What Wentworth should consider are the three all-female productions of Shakespeare that British director Phyllida Lloyd set in a women’s prison – her Julius Caesar in 2012, Henry IV, Part 1 in 2014 and The Tempest in 2016.  A completely same-sex production reveals that Shakespeare’s emphasis is on the politics of power in general and how power corrupts, rather than on the dominance of one gender over another.

As it is, with two of the central roles given weak performances, a lack of energy in the direction and a design that only adds confusion, this Julius Caesar is far from compelling.  The best feature of its gender-blind casting is not to reveal Shakespeare as an anti-patriarchal rebel but rather to allow women to shine in roles traditionally played by men.  The greater experiment would be to allow the women, as does Martha Henry as Prospero in The Tempest this season, to own their roles as women rather than being compelled to imitate men.

©Christopher Hoile

Note: This review is a Stage Door exclusive. 

Photos: (from top) Jonathan Goad as Brutus and Irene Poole as Cassius with members of the company; Seana McKenna as Julius Caesar with Michelle Giroux as Mark Antony. ©2018 David Hou.

For tickets, visit www.stratfordfestival.ca.