Rosanna Vize's set is a white floor, with a black cube upstage, initially serving as a screen for the show's projections, later revolving to show its innards. Onto this clinical setting the cast arrive to perform a jerky, unsettling dance that represents the festival of Lupercalia. The people of Rome are also celebrating the victory of Julius Caesar (Nigel Barrett) over the tyrant Pompey. But who says Pompey was a tyrant, other than Caesar himself? When people who disrupt the celebrations in Caesar's name are "silenced," Cassius (Kelly Gough) believes it's the city's new hero who is the potential dictator, and conspires with Cinna (Robert Jackson,) Casca (Matthew Bulgo,) Trebonius (Pedro Leandro) and others to assassinate him. The real prize will be recruiting Brutus (Thalissa Teixeira) for their cause, as her renowned fairness and loyalty to Rome will lend it validity.
But however well they convince themselves they're on the right side of history, after the assassination Caesar's protégé Mark Antony (William Robinson) has little trouble convincing the people otherwise, and soon the conspirators are losing a civil war. There are more expressionist dance breaks to come, among other touches of directorial flair, but I struggled to see how most of them connected to the story being told. So instead of crimson we get a lot of the black, crude oil-like blood that seems to have become ubiquitous since Carmen Disruption; part of a largely monochrome design, but with a few hints of colour in some costumes, to what effect I'm not sure. Later we get some much brighter colours for the costumes of characters who've died, and whose ghosts occupy the revolving cube. Not exclusively though, and sometimes living characters end up there as well, confusingly.
There's a couple of Ivo van Hove-style countdown clocks, clumsily used: After Caesar's assassination the projections advertise a "pause," but actually the action continues as Barrett's body is replaced by a bloody shirt to symbolise the corpse. This takes less than the advertised two minutes, so the actors have to stand around and run down the clock before starting again. The 20-minute interval is also counted down, but as nobody pays any attention to this it means nothing - once it reaches zero the digits stay up sheepishly for a few more minutes while the audience ambles back to their seats.
At times the stylistic flourishes don't so much add nothing to the story, as act against it. Like when we hear endless descriptions of the apocalyptic hailstorm raging as the conspirators meet, while Adam Sinclair's animations show dark clouds gently rolling against the sky. Elsewhere they seem at a disconnect - we often get some ominous interludes between pretty straightforwardly acted scenes.
But what I found most unusual is that Banerjee's production doesn't seem to have any strong opinion on the play's events: Shakespeare gives us so little of the title character that there's huge scope to decide how much merit there is in the conspirators' claims: Whether that means agreeing that Caesar is a nascent despot, or that it's the faction who are ambitious terrorists, or even that the whole thing is just part of an endless loop of freedom fighters who grow into dictators. Here the characters' arguments are presented at face value, so there's no hint either of Gough's Cassius having an ulterior motive, or of the political manipulation underscoring Robinson's impassioned "Friends, Romans, Countrymen." The performances are good individually, but it's hard to see an overarching view of how they fit together.
The two themes that do come across are of Brutus' fatalistic view that death comes to everyone so you might as well accept it when it's imminent; and a kind of operatic ritual element (there's often ominous singing from the Community Chorus of unpaid extras) that ties into the idea that Caesar's death was more sacrifice than murder. In a gender-balanced cast the casual use of the actors' preferred pronouns for their characters works well, although once again the scansion-over-sense choice of "she is an honourable man" is an unintended punchline.
Among the better choices, the casting of Jamal Ajala as a Deaf Lucius does explain how he seems to sleep through quite so many battles; as well as providing probably the best scene of the afternoon, as Teixeira's Brutus gets to come into her own in a completely silent scene, asking Lucius to assist her suicide through sign language only. But if it's an unusual production, it's rarely in a good way - I certainly wasn't as bored as I've been by the play at times, but neither did it give me much to really get interested in, or see what the show was really trying to bring to the play.
Julius Caesar by William Shakespeare is booking until the 8th of April at the Royal Shakespeare Theatre, Stratford-upon-Avon; them continuing on tour to Canterbury, Truro, Bradford, Newcastle, Blackpool, Nottingham, Norwich, York and Salford.
Running time: 2 hours 45 minutes including interval.
Photo credit: Marc Brenner.
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