The banality of evil feels somehow central to the RSC’s latest production of Julius Caesar, which arrived at the Lowry last night. Of normal people - ‘all honourable men’ as Mark Antony says - doing terrible things.
In his debut for the company, director Atri Banerjee, an alumnus of the Royal Exchange, places his story of Roman treachery in what looks and feels like an office. And what could be more banal than that?
Whether this is intentional or not is unclear, but the parallels are striking. Banerjee’s Caesar (Nigel Barrett) is dressed like a schlubby manager, untucked and scruffy, with the rest of the cast wardrobed in the gamut of office attire ranging from the prissy boat neck work dress through to the chap from IT with the propensity for wacky shirts.
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During the first half, the imposing cube-shaped set, which almost fills the stage and revolves by scene, has more than a whiff of office decor, the panelling, the strip lighting, the token indoor tree. Even the manner of Caesar’s murder - smeared with black blood like so much toner from the printer, as if the office Christmas party had gone suddenly and violently awry.
In that very apt regard, it brings to mind recent treachery and wretchedly self-serving behaviour conducted in the disappointingly dreary corridors of power. A man with unchecked ambition finally stabbed in the back by his own former acolytes, and again that horrible possibility of normal people in an office doing actually dreadful things, though in this case not while p***ed up on wine and then posting the evidence to WhatsApp.
It’s a creative production, not least with its mixed gender casting, incorporating at times physicality, visual arts and nods to contemporary dance. On the top of the cube stage set, an opera singer, a guitarist and a trombone player appear occasionally to layer up an unsettling soundscape and foreboding images are projected onto its side.
Thalissa Teixeira, in a striking debut for the RSC as Brutus, is disarmingly natural, though both William Robinson’s Mark Anthony and Annabel Baldwin’s Cassius veer towards the loud, slightly blunt instrument.
There are moments of brilliance. Calpurnia’s (Jimena Larraguivel) howl over Caesar’s body, and Brutus’s death, conducted in silence and in sign language, resonated.
Also the nods to black humour, as Caesar’s ghost returns to Brazilian singer Caetano Veloso’s Nine Out Of Ten, and how the cube set slowly fills up with the dead as each one pays the price for their treason. Niamh Finlay’s Soothsayer is also manically captivating.
But it doesn’t all quite hang together, these disparate elements of its staging, and it somehow lacked power, the second act feeling at times rushed and truncated. With the dance, the set, the opera, the imagery, perhaps there's simply a bit too much going on.
Julius Caesar runs at The Lowry until June 24.
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