Peter Hall’s “Julius Caesar”
In Peter Hall's new staging of Shakespeare’s “Julius Caesar”, which opened on Wednesday night in Stratfora-upon Avon, one little episode stands out. Brutus is in his tent on the night before the battle of Philippi, and at his bidding, his servant Lucius (Daniel Goode) plays a little music on the lyre.
The music lasts perhaps less than thirty seconds. Lucius plucks the strings slowly, and then sings a frail phrase or two; then sleep overwhelms him. And yet the scene is magical. The music, exotic in melody, is beautiful in itself, and we feel the brief struggle between Lucius's musicianship and his weariness - all of which is a potent setting for Brutus's last night on earth.
Surely no director has a finer sense of the importance of music in Shakespeare's plays than Hall. How come, then, that he repeatedly spoils this same production with the kind of cheaply ominous offstage, muzak that belongs to the dark "suspense" effects of a melodramatic movie? And so repetitiously employed. Almost every scene in this production uses the same two or three low, distant-thunder-like, pedal notes the composer is Guy Woolfenden, the RSC's head of music - very gradually heaving up from the depths like a sub-Wagnerian serpent. The effect ruins any spontaneity the actors have been building up. To make matters worse, taped crowd effects are also employed.
As a melodrama, Hall's “Julius Caesar” is fair enough. He makes sure the tale is clearly told, he underlines every portentous effect, he makes each death strikingly different, he provides plenty of blood. John Gunter’s scenery emphasises this aspect, hanging huge symbolic claws or wings above the stage (or Caesar's giant bust in the sky run ning blood). Deirdre Clancy's costumes suggest Republican Rome by way of both the Renaissance and the present day.
It is a surprise that the crowd scenes are so tame. It is more of a surprise, however, that Hall - founding artistic director of the Royal Shakespeare Company, returning to its main Stratford stage for the first time in twneyy-eight years- does not elicit more of this play's tragic dimension. Christopher Benjamin's Caesar is an entirely thespian conception, fretful of behaviour, plummy of voice, and worlds away from the great dictator. “Et tu, Brute?" is enounced slowly, quietly, but con molto vibrato, the play's most melodramatic utterance of all
Hugh Quarshie is happiest with the Mr Nice Guy side of Mark Antony - the ambition, calculation, and artful demagoguery of the character do not concern him. Michael Gardiner, despite whooshing sibilants, makes a strong impact with Casca’s first scene.
John Nettles’s Brutus is a very accomplished display of acting technique that seldom rings true. Multiple touches are beautiful, such as the pointing of names (the first mention of Philippi; and the shading of parenthetical remarks (“I know not how”). His light baritone is finely burnished; and he can stand with true stillness. But nothing dissolves into character. The spirit remains too small to convince as “the noblest of the Romans”, and the workings of the mind behind the well-judged actorly effects are never open.
Julian Glover's Cassius, by contrast, is interesting to watch even when he is listening or looking away. And there is a force of temperament here beside which Brutus and everyone else onstage seem minor. His first scenes, admittedly, are slightly stiff and rushed and vocally bottled up. From Caesar's murder on, however, he is an exemplum both in compelling minor detail and in his sure awareness of the historic scale of the events he is helping to shape or being shaped by.
@Alastair Macaulay, @Financial Times 1995