Friends, Romans, Africans

There’s an honourable track record of versions of Shakespeare’s play presenting Julius Caesar as a dictatorial monster of modern times. In 1937 Orson Welles (playing Brutus) cast Caesar as Mussolini and staged many scenes like Nazi rallies. Despite a curmudgeonly critic dismissing the conspirators as looking like ‘a committee from a taxi-driver’s union’, the show was a huge hit and set in motion a train of similar readings. In Miami in 1986 audiences applauded the murderous disposal of Fidel Castro. At the RSC the following year Terry Hands directed a nakedly fascist Caesar, while in London in 1993 Caesar was played by a woman, thus supposedly representing the political assassination of Margaret Thatcher.

So there’s little novelty in the RSC now tackling the play ‘with a little help from Idi Amin and Mugabe’ as a headline in the Daily Telegraph put it. The real novelty is that Gregory Doran, who in September takes over from Michael Boyd as artistic director, sets the play in an indeterminate modern African state and directs an all-black cast.