Early in the Trump administration, there was controversy over a New York staging of Julius Caesar in which the actor playing the slain tyrant resembled the 45th president. British prime ministers change so rapidly these days that a similar approach would risk recasting during rehearsal. However, Atri Banerjee’s deliberately non-Spitting Image RSC production stresses the remarkable universality of the play’s dissection of leaders and the led, fulfilling Cassius’s prophecy that Caesar’s murder will be “acted over in states unborn and accents yet unknown”.
The wider political context now is the flimsiness of power. Of the core world leaders who attended the 2019 G7 meeting, only two remain in power and one, Japan’s Shinzo Abe, was assassinated after leaving office. As the psephological sage John Curtice has pointed out, almost no head of government who led a country through Covid is still in post. Such churn gives urgency to the scene in which the conspirators discuss wanting power and what they will do with it; Brutus, leaving Mark Anthony in play, pays later for his kindness/weakness.
In this version, Brutus and Cassius are played by Thalissa Teixeira and Kelly Gough, the characters’ pronouns changed to “she” and “her”, although curiously Anthony’s eulogy for Brutus still predicts that people will say: “This was a man!” There’s an intriguing hint of an anti-feminist dystopia in which women – also including Ella Dacres’ Octavius Caesar – are forced, like some nuns, to take male names, and this may also be an attempt at complete gender-fluidity of language, but the switches sometimes jar between eye and ear.
Movement director Jennifer Jackson introduces a prologue and interludes in which actors swirl and howl, reminiscent of Bill Viola’s video installations of choreographed mobs. This underlines the play’s reflections on crowds and power, and more is made than usual of the feast of Lupercal being as significant a date as the Ides of March, this play sometimes seeming to be previewing Macbeth’s supernatural framing. Startlingly, stabbed Caesar bleeds black blood, possibly hinting at the oil greed of capitalism, which stains his assassins for the rest of the play.
The crackle of these additions is sometimes absent from the dialogue. Though Banerjee eschews the enclosing Perspex box so modish in classical productions, there can feel to be a cold screen between actors and audience, possibly because the staging must fit nine different theatres on a UK tour.
As Mark Antony, William Robinson suggests a weak, wonkish figure who rises higher than rivals expect, underlining Shakespeare’s prescience in identifying all known political types, as do Teixeira and Gough’s respective embodiments of an intellectual but unworldly and impatiently passionate legislator: most systems have such a Brutus and Cassius. Nigel Barrett’s cockily populist Caesar rings various alarm bells around the world, and Matthew Bulgo makes Casca the sort of cultured, honey-voiced thug that all administrations seem to have. Annabel Baldwin strikingly extends the role of Soothsayer into scene-shifter and conscience of the populace.
That Julius Caesar ends with an unlikely and uneasy coalition in charge will also prove, in many places, further evidence of the eternal political truths of the play.
At the Royal Shakespeare theatre, Stratford-upon-Avon, until 8 April. Then touring 20 April-24 June
