April expeditions: Julius Caesar, RSC @ BAM

It’s started before you arrive. At the door, the usher herself tells you to turn off your cellphone, because the play has already begun. You look up and realize there’s a street party on. A band is playing township jive, and there’s dancing and singing and waving of flags, and hand-screened posters with Caesar’s image on them. It’s a d.i.y. political rally, ANC-style.

The unit set is a stepped concrete structure, like a development project from some heyday of international aid, now crumbling at the corners, rebar and wire exposed, with a tunnel entrance in the center. Here it’s the streetscape where the citizens gather to celebrate the victory of Caesar over Pompey. Next it will be the stadium where the hero of the hour will be offered a crown. (Later it will serve for Brutus’s house, the senate, the hills of the battleground of Philippi).  At its height looms a giant bronze statue, facing away toward the People, right hand raised in blessing or salute. We’re in the Democratic Republic of Rome, some time after its liberation. There have been challenges survived, other things endured. The present seems stable and the future seems bright. The only hint of the gathering disaster is in the crowd, among the dancers, the one painted in ash, the one who talks to spirits.

When Flavius and Marullus arrive, they arrive as uniformed men armed with sjamboks -- men bearing the hallmarks of officialdom, but no friends to this regime. They berate the crowd for being so quick to change allegiances. Weren’t they celebrating Pompey not so long ago?  It’s our second indicator, beyond the palpable structural decay, that we haven’t begun at the beginning. Flavius and Marullus break up the crowd. The next thing we hear about them, they’ve been “put to silence”.

Caesar (Jeffery Kissoon), dressed in tropical white linen, arrives for the victory games – the set is now the exterior of a stadium – with the senators and Mark Antony (Ray Fearon, incidentally also the first Marquis Posa we ever saw). When Caesar hears his name from the crowd, no one has spoken. It’s in his head, that summons, but the ash-painted dancer – “He’s a soothsayer,” says Brutus (Paterson Joseph), wryly dismissive -- watching from above, gives the warning. Caesar doesn’t take it seriously either. Not really.

This is just one of the points in this production where director Gregory Doran’s approach works hand-in-glove, this intersection of tradition with a fraught modernity. Brutus and his fellow conspirators, stoics and skeptics in the Roman frame of reference, are here more representative of a kind of postcolonial westernization, underscored in some cases by a particular costume shorthand: reading glasses, Malcolm X frames. You can imagine these men feeling that the country is theirs to save by right of the advanced degrees they hold and the articles they write. In that world, problems are solved by the application of Reason and Engineering. There is little room for spirits.

Caesar occupies an area more grey. For him the Soothsayer’s warning isn’t an affront to Reason, it’s an affront to Image, and Image is everything. His clothing in that first scene is an ostentatious degree of white. His actions at the games, as Casca relates them, are all political theater.  He continually refers to himself in the third person, working to create a public image of Caesar as solid as the bronze monument that ostensibly represents him (more solid and enduring, it turns out, than the man himself, although pulled down, Saddam Hussein-like, in the political chaos of the second act). 

When Caesar abandons this rhetorical strategy, it’s when he feels he’s on the ropes. He tells Antony a man like Cassius (Cyril Nri) – overintellectual, overengaged -- is to be feared, but then is quick to say that he himself, of course, is not afraid of him. Often this conversation is staged as a sidebar, but here Caesar rates Cassius publicly, speaking of him to Antony in everybody’s hearing. It’s an unmistakable display of power: Cassius has also been officially third-personed -- turned into a public image, though not one to be celebrated -- and he is visibly terrified.

           

In some ways, of course, this is Shakespeare’s most relevant play to our own age and you don’t need to be a student of Shakespeare, or contemporary African history, to understand what’s at work in Doran’s conception of it. He places particular emphasis on Mark Antony’s manipulation of public perception -- the famous speech that is the crux of the play – and the naivete of Brutus, who, like any Aaron Sorkin dream of liberalism, believes that the People can be counted on to prefer substance over style. In the end, of course, they don’t. Brutus speaks his complex rationalizations in elegant prose, Mark Antony speaks simple lies in magnificent verse.

Did the play need to be placed in a modern African context to accomplish this degree of contemporary relevance? Maybe yes, maybe no. Guns and olive drab are universal tropes. But it ends up working brilliantly in the broad spectrum as well as in the details: things like the “necklacing” of Cinna the Poet, and Lucius serenading himself to sleep with a kora (which kind of ups the ante on Brutus leaping to save it).

Moreover there is something in the way the actors employ the language, as well as in their individual performances (and this was very much an ensemble production), that softens up the text and renders it crystal clear. I’m not sure whether this was more that the accents used lend themselves to the particular rhetorical mode of this play, or if it was just a matter of an ensemble cast inhabiting their lines so completely that the text comes out lean and unhurried. Probably both. But the end result is it really doesn’t get better than this.