William Robinson makes Mark Antony’s great “Friends, Romans, Countrymen” speech his own, with quiet insinuation and roaring incitements. Teixeira wrestles visibly with similar doubts, but is never less than a commanding figure, even when most troubled.
Gough finds an anxious, nail-chewing fearfulness in her role as the chief conspirator, before putting on the resolution of the soldier, a mood that turns to fury when she believes herself distrusted. The idiosyncrasies of the production should not overshadow some excellent performances in a cast dominated by female actors in male roles, in particular by Kelly Gough as Cassius and Thalissa Teixeira as Brutus.
It might, as the programme explains, refer to life and mortality under dictatorship, but it sounds completely out of place, even in this modern, casually-dressed production. Strangest of all, the song to which Cassius listens before the battle of Philippi is a jolly-sounding Brazilian number. Yet the mob itself, an important character in the changing fortunes of the city, is reduced to a one-person rabble, albeit as impressively impersonated by Annabel Baldwin, or to a voice-over interrogation of the unfortunate Cinna the Poet by a computer. The suffering common people of Rome are represented by the entire cast, stomping on and on, before and after the killing. The deaf actor Jamal Ajala is reasonably cast as Lucius, but having him play another of Brutus’s servants, who is made to participate in his master’s suicide by sign language, inevitably dulls this climactic point of the drama. Other aspects of the production are less successful. It’s another bold stroke, besmirching for evermore its filthy stain on the arms and faces of plotters and Mark Antony alike. The murder itself leaves Caesar covered not in blood, but in black goo, which leaves him looking like a seagull killed by a massive oil spill.
It’s a high-risk device, but Banerjee’s audacity pays off. Indeed, the soundscape designed by Claire Windsor is one of the production’s most successful features, including wolf cries and shrieks from the ensemble and the sighs of the black-clad, Greek-style chorus of women.Īfter the death of Caesar-a steadfast Nigel Barrett-the action stops for two minutes, counted down on a great digital clock, a time to pause and consider the action of the conspirators and its possible aftermath. The show opens to the threatening loud dissonance of a trombone played far above the stage. That the tyranny and suffering will never end is evident in the trance-like writhing of actors, the projection onto a large screen of lowering clouds and seedlings that grow only to wither and a rotating grey box that gradually accommodates all who die as a consequence of Caesar’s assassination. That could be the watchword for Atri Banerjee’s expressionistic, sometimes thrilling, sometimes baffling modern take on Shakespeare’s greatest classical play.
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