Reviewer Steve Sutherland finds a lot to admire in Atri Banerjee’s bold and playful take on Julius Caesar at the RSC

Julius Caesar, Royal Shakespeare Theatre, at Stratford until 8th April then touring

****

There’s this golden rule for musicians that if you decide to do a cover version of somebody else’s song, put your own interpretation on it, change it, tear it up, make it fresh to the world. Otherwise we might as well go listen to the original. I’m thinking here of what Jimi Hendrix did in electrocuting Bob Dylan’s All Along The Watchtower or what Devo did when they injected the St Vitus dance into the Rolling Stones’ Satisfaction.

I mention this because, in order to fully appreciate the iconoclastic intent of the RSC’s latest take on Julius Caesar, it may well benefit us to look upon it as a cover version. Pretty much everything traditionally held sacred about the play is deliberately and refreshingly undermined. The actors are stripped of their robes and armour and bumble around in a mismatch of ordinary clobber, togas swapped out for everyday togs.The characters are shorn of all gravitas, there are no swords or knives or weapons of any ilk whatsoever, no columns or doric pillars, no gargantuan steps upon which to pontificate, and the rivers of blood we’ve been conditioned to expect are conspicuous by their absence, replaced by black ink, like a biro leaking in your pocket. And as for the Ides Of March and all that. Pffft. The warning is delivered by Annabel Baldwin’s soothsayer with all the spookiness of Mystic Meg (RIP), the whole supernatural dimension so downplayed as to be mocked. Later the same actor, still donning Sports Direct trackies, will personify the general public, so cruelly created by Shakespeare as brainless dolts, easily swayed in their affections. They are the sole mob, reduced to a silly theatrical device, in effect critiquing the Bard’s creation and finding it wanting. We are they, of course, and director Atri Banerjee won’t have us treated that way.

I must come clean and confess at this point that one of the reasons I found this production so satisfying is that usually Julius Caesar bores me. All those long speeches, all that stuff about toxic masculinity and the fascistic urge to elevate power into deity is so stuffy and statuesque. Ok, there are political parallels which could have easily been emphasised but the Trump/ Putin/Johnson gangsters-who-wanna-be-gods angle has already been done to death and it’s so tediously obvious that it’s become an insult to the audience’s intelligence. So credit where it’s due, if nothing else this show brings it all back home. Instead of the Senate, we get Ricky Gervais’ Office, the characters an oddball but recognisable bunch. The sole majesty about Nigel Barrett’s Caesar is in his own head. He’s a pompous ass, a little bit scruffy, a bully of a boss, his dominion over the others like that of a tiresome manager with ambitions to join the board of directors. Kelly Gough’s Cassius is the hothead who acts and speaks on impulse, annoyingly prone to accelerating any situation to crisis-point and making quite the fuss about it. Thaliissa Teixeira’s Brutus is like the sainted PA who sees the bigger picture and seeks to keep an even keel amidst the mutiny, while William Robinson’s Mark Antony is the mouthy, sarcy, know-it-all youngster with high ideals but dubious ability. I was certainly on nodding terms with Matthew Bulgo’s Casca, the very image of the eternally harassed bloke from accounts, and Nadi Kemp-Sayfi’s splendid Portia, the idealised wife who’s ground down and marginalised through no fault of her own.

These are people known to us in our daily lives, ones who behave as we do. We find them sympathetic or irritating by turns, depending on the circumstances. Once the seemingly now-not-so-dreadful deed is done and Caesar has fallen, his body is replaced on the stage by his ink/oil stained shirt, folded, just lying there. It’s as if the boss has been fired and in the haste to get him out, his jacket has been left hanging on the peg behind the door. And there it remains, an unwelcome symbolic reminder of regrettable mismanagement.