Much was made of the toothless nature of Labour MPs’ recent attempts to dethrone Gordon Brown with commentators complaining that the rebels couldn’t succeed in securing a big enough beast to spearhead a credible challenge. Disaffected backbenchers would have done well to organise a trip down to Stratford on Avon (on expenses of course) to see the RSC’s current production of Julius Caesar.
Director Lucy Bailey‘s Rome is red in tooth and claw: the play opens with Romulus and Remus wrestling each other to the death to the sounds of strange animal shrieks offstage. Daz white togas, conveniently straight roads and hot baths are conspicuously absent: this Rome is no stranger to the blood on which it was founded.
The first hour, as the plot thickens, is absolutely electric. Sam Troughton is a handsome and cerebral Brutus who genuinely wants the best for the Republic but his scruples are no match for the pincer movement deployed against him so masterfully by John Mackay’s wily Cassius and Oliver Ryan’s magnificently sinister Casca. Once Brutus is joined to the conspiracy, the pace of the action kicks up another notch as if fate itself were hurrying on the death of Caesar.
Designer William Dudley’s blend of a simple set in front of detailed video projection (of composite crowd images) makes the mob arbiter in what becomes a very personal power struggle within a group of talented but incompatible men. Greg Hicks’ Caesar is at once a charismatic leader and an intolerable dictator but intolerable to whom? Darrell D’Silva’s muscular Mark Anthony has little trouble rousing the Roman rabble to such a fit of righteous indignation at the murder of their military master that Cinna the Poet is torn to pieces just for having the same name as a conspirator. The implication is that the plotters are keener on shoring up their own power than redistributing Caesar’s.
The second half of the production sags somewhat but only in comparison with the 90 minutes of crackling tension that lead up to the interval.
Gordon Brown is lucky the plotters couldn’t find a Cassius in his cabinet but might there yet be a Brutus? When in Rome…
