a man's mind, a woman's might: Donmar Julius Caesar part 2

This is late and long. Part 1 is here.

So I went twice, because at the end, when the play is done and the five minute warning has sounded in the middle of everything and the prisoners are called to order; and when Caesar, who has been hanging around as revenants do, observing like the dead observe, stands up and peals off the prisoner drag to reveal a guard’s uniform underneath; and when, under Caesar’s watchful eye, the inmates line up and go one by one back into the cellblock but Brutus lags, weeping in the corner, a well of misery, until Caesar tells her flatly to hurry up…is when it turns out the setting wasn’t just a way to justify the casting. By the middle of the first performance I had been wondering if they really needed the overarching prison concept. By the end of the second it was no and yes.

No, they didn’t need the prison concept to prove the point about women and Shakespeare. There were clearly different acting styles at work, but what this brought to the fore was a sense of balance among the leads: Harriet Walter’s quietly chafing, reserved, slow-burning Brutus the counterweight to Jenny Jules’s reactive, disgruntled, physically dynamic Cassius; Cush Jumbo’s emotional, impulsive, physically dynamic Antony the heir to Frances Barber’s confident, controlling, casually brutalizing Caesar.

Up the River - to BK through Sing Sing

No, but yes. In an interview, Frances Barber described her Caesar as “I’m the top dog, the butchest, the Bitch.” It didn’t register on first viewing that she first arrives alone, and through a different door. Given the jubilant reception, you would assume that she was a prisoner who’d been out for a little – released or in solitary - and had just been returned. In fact, she’s come in through the same door as the audience, the one marked “Staff and Official Visitors”. The creepy Caesar-choreographed dance routine that ensues– where everybody dons Caesar masks and moves in lockstep – is that much creepier when it’s the prison admin who’s set herself up for this much supposed adoration.

But masks are for hiding. So when Caesar goes up to the balcony with her supporters for the (board) games, Brutus and Cassius remain below, and Brutus lets down the front. Casca (Susan Brown) arrives, with a tough northern accent and a flinty attitude. Director Phyllida Lloyd has edited out the play's first victims, Flavius and Marullus, so Casca delivers the news that those caught dissing Caesar “are to be put to silence.” Rather than a done deal, a credible threat.

When Caesar comes down from the games, she comes with a box of doughnuts, a rare treat for everyone, but Cassius stands aloof. Cassius, Caesar observes, is too thin, and thin is the indicator of a malcontent. So Caesar asserts her dominance by making Cassius sit, shoving a doughnut into her mouth, and then biting it out again. Caesar takes her time with it, trapping Cassius in her chair, occupying as much of her personal space as possible. When Caesar lets up, Cassius explodes out of her confinement, spitting out in a rage what’s left in her mouth. When it comes time to murder Caesar, it will be Cassius with the bleach.

Prophecy has already come down in the form of a tabloid horoscope. The Soothsayer (Carrie Rock) is an unearthly girl on a tricycle, lit by flashlight from below, carrying a baby doll in the basket. The future resides with children, and old hatreds aren’t theirs to have.  When the augurer slaughters a dog, she delivers her alarming verdict in another language (Ukrainian?). Caesar herself translates it. The words in her own mouth are enough to shake her confidence. They could have saved her life, until Casca (subbing for deleted Decius Brutus) skillfully unwinds her reasoning.

Caesar arrives at the Capitol in a blast of light, and hears the Publius Cimber suit from the front row of the audience (Antony having directed the occupant of that chair to another). Casca delivers the first strike from the second row. Brutus delivers the last. Antony takes off up the risers. It's Caesar's prerogative to take her time with this, too.

The conspirators announce Rome’s freedom, and wash their hands in Caesar’s blood (here represented by the donning of red rubber gloves) and resolve to sell the deed to the people. (I’ve never quite understood how the bloody hands thing is supposed to work as a Public Relations Coup, but never mind.) So we come to the crux of the play, Brutus’s prose speech to the Romans versus Antony’s poetry. Brutus speaks at a crowd of hyper-milling Romans, at first confronting a wall of panic or indifference, but eventually, one by one, the perpetual motion stops and she wins the crowd.  She’s on their shoulders by the end, a hero. Then the crowd morphs into a ring of gun-toting Romans surrounding Antony, face down on the ground with her hands where they can see them. We know how Antony takes the crowd from Brutus with a deft deployment of verse and irony. By the middle she’s on her feet and they’re hers, and by the time she gets to Caesar’s will, she has all the presentation skills of a game show host showing off the glittering prizes. You keep expecting her to say “But wait, there’s more…”

It’s the beginning of Antony’s metamorphosis from Caesar’s biggest fangirl to the rage-driven, coldly calculating general arguing finer points of strategy with a Provo Octavius (Clare Dunne) as they pass down the line shooting hooded prisoners in the head. By then Antony has already displayed Caesar’s black duster to the public, given an itemized narration of the slashes, and whipped the mob up into a frenzy. When the rioters, looking for Cinna the Senator, encounter Cinna the Poet instead…there’s suddenly an announcement over the PA: Cinna the Poet has to go for her meds. She’s escorted back into the block by a guard, and another takes her place. But Understudy Cinna (Helen Cripps) isn’t off book for that role, and the rest of the players are annoyed, so the murder of Cinna the Poet gets a little rougher than intended and ends in her face getting smashed into a pole and her with a bloody nose. The play comes to a screeching halt while the players cool off and snarl at each other ("Fucking tosser!" says Casca at someone), and dead Caesar, who has been observing from the balcony, has a tête-à-tête with the same senior guard who gave us the rules when we came in. Needless to say, they agree to let the play go on.

Brutus and Cassius fight their petty squabble over money in Brutus’s tent, represented by a curtain hung across the back. Cassius demonstrates her indifference to Brutus’s complaints by lounging on a scrounged sofa, picking up a Playboy and gazing at the centerfold while Brutus lectures about integrity. Brutus takes the magazine and tosses it aside. Real life interferes here, too, when one of the players makes a noise behind the curtain – a sneeze in the first performance – and Brutus breaks character to berate them. (“All you have to do is sit there quietly. How hard is that to do? Wankers!”)

The rift with Cassius made up over Brutus’s story of Portia’s death, and Cassius moved on, Lucius (Susan Wokoma) sings a song and the ghost of Portia appears to Brutus. She and Brutus slow dance. Then Caesar’s ghost replaces Portia’s. And then the war begins.

Antony has fetishized the black coat and now she wears it, rents and all, for the battles that take up the final act. The cachet it gives her – and the confidence – puts her in conflict with Octavius, Caesar’s official heir. They’ll fight each other for airtime in the end.

The battles are cloaked in metal guitar riffs. Revenant Caesar directs the spotlight that misleads Cassius’s lookout, posted halfway up a support column, into thinking the battle is lost. Brutus, losing Cassius and Philippi, holds a gun to her own head but can’t bring herself to pull the trigger, her screaming drowned out in the guitar feedback of armed conflict. By now this is more than Brutus on the printed page. By now we’ve seen enough to wonder who these women are, how they got here, how this play was chosen, how they landed in these roles.

And we begin to realize how cruel a choice of play this is. The ambition of which Caesar is accused has no meaning here, because, in the end, this production isn’t about political power in the wide world. It’s about power in a fishbowl. As much as these conspirators might be given leave to enact this revenge ritual -- to murder the Power in the front row of the audience with rubber knives and a video camera and a dose of cleaning fluid, and after to proclaim that liberty and enfranchisement have won the day -- when all is said and done, they’re still going back into the unit and Caesar’s still the one telling them to hurry up and locking the heavy doors behind them, all of them, supporters and conspirators alike. How do we suppose they got in there in the first place? Caesar wins in both worlds.