Nicholas Hytner’s new show is a modern-dress Julius Caesar, heavily cut and played in the round. It runs for two hours, no interval. The action opens with the audience grouped around a central stage where a ramshackle rock gig descends into a riot. The play unfolds like an illegal rave at a warehouse. It’s bold, in its way, and some of it works.
A couple of the Roman senators are played by actresses and the text has been bodged to suit the cult of gender neutrality. ‘Romans’ is substituted for ‘men’ in Mark Antony’s famous line, ‘so are they all, all honourable men’. This small change is curiously painful to hear. It turns the ominous finality of Shakespeare’s original into a tuneless clatter.
Visually the play is eccentrically suburban. Michelle Fairley (Cassius, believe it or not) looks like a dinner lady stranded at a bus stop. She wears a blue Primark raincoat with a handbag slung over her shoulder. A handbag? She’s a Roman general fighting a civil war. And we’re asked to believe that she plucked David Calder’s burly Caesar from the Tiber and saved him from drowning. He’s twice her size. Calder’s Caesar is all right. He’s a lot older than 56, and far too giggly at first, but he calms down and becomes more statesmanlike later. His costumes are poor: a leather jacket and a Soviet general’s greatcoat. I saw Soviet togs in this play in 1980 and even then they looked dated. David Morrissey’s Mark Antony is good but flawed. Like Calder, he’s too old. And why the silvery beard? Mark Antony is a sex god, not Captain Bird’s Eye. Morrissey is blessed with a beautiful, hypnotic voice which gives him a real air of authority when he converts the Roman mob to his cause.
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