RSC Friends

Photograph by Helen Maybanks

Gary Watt’s ‘Handling Shakespeare’s Rhetoric’ presentation really whetted my appetite for Angus Jackson’s new production of Julius Caesar. Professor Watt had focused on Brutus’ and Mark Antony’s funeral orations in Act 3 Scene 2 and I was curious to see how the play would present the crowd’s gullibility and fickle affections. It is not usual to praise crowd scenes but this was wonderfully well done and the link with the current tide of populism, made explicit in the excellent programme notes, made this scene all the more ominous and powerful.

This production is full of memorable scenes that unsettle and chill the blood. Caesar’s bloody assassination and the murder of Cinna the poet due to mistaken identity by the ignorant plebeians. The staging is sparse suggesting the forum’s columns, a sculpture depicting a lion savaging a horse echoes the mood of incipient violence. The music conjures up the tension and foreboding that pervades the play.

Adopting classical Roman dress for this play at this time works extremely well, at once highlighting the parallels between societies two thousand years apart but facing similar challenges to their political structures.