Now is obviously the perfect time to launch a season tracking the disintegration of a mighty empire. But where Ivo van Hove’s Roman Tragedies, recently at the Barbican, put the plays into modern dress, the RSC’s approach in its Shakespeare’s Rome season is to view them as historical documents and allow us to deduce the political parallels. What is surprising, in a day-long opening salvo, is that Julius Caesar emerges as much the more exciting play and, in spite of Josette Simon’s magnetic presence as Cleopatra, the more thrilling production.
Angus Jackson and Robert Innes Hopkins, as director and designer of Julius Caesar, usher us into a Rome that, for all its imposing marble columns, is clearly filled with inner turbulence. The great virtue of the production, which is spoken with exemplary clarity, is its nuanced portrayal of the divisions among those conspiring against a dictatorial Caesar. Even in Brutus’s orchard, they break into warring factions. Alex Waldmann portrays Brutus as a troubled neurotic who masks his uncertainty by making a series of wrong-headed decisions: my abiding image is of him sitting alone, after the conspirators have departed, trembling with fear at the task ahead.
It is a good performance but it is Martin Hutson’s brilliant Cassius that dominates proceedings. Snubbed by Caesar and trusting implicitly in Brutus, he is a man who mixes political idealism with tactical shrewdness: I’ve never seen better expressed Cassius’s initial wariness at broaching the idea of assassination or his mounting exasperation at his colleague’s disastrous follies. Everything about this production feels right.
James Corrigan’s Mark Antony is a calculating cynic who tears up Caesar’s fake will once it has done its work, and savagely snaps the neck of Brutus’s page. Andrew Woodall shows us Caesar’s personal disabilities while creating a figure of overwhelming vanity and power. Even if I wish it were played without interval, the production proves you don’t need fascist costumes or images of Trump for the play’s relevance to emerge: you could say it’s a classic study of the dangers of division among opponents of unbridled authority.
Although it also opts for historical verisimilitude, Iqbal Khan’s Antony and Cleopatra is less focused and more loosely spoken. It makes some interesting choices. Rome, instead of offering the usual stoical contrast to a voluptuous Egypt, is a place where male leaders gather in steamy bath rooms. Ben Allen plays Octavius as a controlled hysteric with a dangerous obsession with Mark Antony. The staging gathers power as it goes along, with the battle at sea being effectively presented through toy ships.
Everything comes down to the two leads. Simon seems born to play Cleopatra and she gives us a hypnotically mercurial figure whose eroticism is expressed through a permanent restlessness. For my money, she puts on too many different voices, ranging from guttural power to Eartha Kitt croon. Khan also encourages her to be over-literal, so that, in envisioning Antony’s horse, she herself bestrides the faithful Charmian. But Simon is excellent in the closing passages suggesting that Cleopatra is living out a fantasy of an idealised Antony. The point is underlined by having Anthony Byrne play her Roman lover as an “old ruffian” who seems more at home in the barrack room than the boudoir and as much attached to Woodall’s soldierly Enobarbus as to his temperamental queen.
It’s a production that may take time to settle in. At the moment, Julius Caesar decisively shows why all roads lead to Rome.
•At the Royal Shakespeare theatre, Stratford-upon-Avon, until 9 September. Box office: 01789 403493.
