Early on in Dominic Dromgoole’s Julius Caesar, right before they get down to the business of butchering Caesar like ‘a dish fit for the gods’ (or, rather, hacking at him madly), a giant sacrificial cow swings in on a rope, and everybody in the audience jumps. This impeccably-timed blend of the apt and the unexpected characterises so much of this production.
This Caesar makes steady, suspenseful progress through intricate oration to carefully sinister Elizabethanist mob violence and back again, leaving plenty of space for the actors to explore the details of their characters.
In a play that is so pervasively about the power of rhetoric, Tom McKay (Brutus) and Anthony Howell (Cassius) are no silently pondering protagonists, but think through their plots and plans by talking and debating with a visible, dynamic energy. Luke Thompson (who is somewhat in the background until after Caesar’s death) plays Antony as a Iago-figure, turning bluffly to the audience to revel in the ‘mischief’ he has raised with his wide-eyed, honourable exhortations to the violent crowd. When Thompson’s Antony does show emotion and vulnerability as he stoops over Caesar’s corpse, we might wonder if (as all the rhetorical treatises that were so popular in the Renaissance advise) he is carefully cultivating grief and anger only in order to make his later orations more persuasive.
George Irving’s Caesar is another fresh interpretation. Majestically loping, he is intriguingly different to recent Caesars such as Frances Barber’s bombastically arrogant prison bully or Jeffery Kissoon’s sickly grown-up child grasping greedily at power. When the conspirators set on him, Irving’s Caesar insists on struggling back to his feet and standing tall, pinked with stab-wounds, before Brutus delivers the final blow: a testament to his nobility, no matter how pernicious we think that nobility to be.
Several of the conspirators, too (who, unforgettably aghast, go to painful effort to steel themselves as they kill Caesar), are superbly characterised in this production, especially given that they are so often liable to be lumped together in a muffled, mutinous heap. Christopher Logan’s Casca, especially, is very funny in his fastidious disgust at almost everything that happens; on edge throughout the production he’s particularly horrified when he gets the messiest at Caesar’s death.
Dickon Tyrrell’s blunt Decius seems bored by Brutus’ flowered rhetoric, preferring to focus on peeling oranges; yet he is the most fearsome conspirator as Tyrrell plays him with the quiet, unflappable, sinister intellect of a true fanatic.
When the servant Strato removes his hat before stabbing Brutus to reveal that he is none other than Caesar, Irving and McKay create a genuinely uncanny moment. As mannered and controlled, and as bloodied with beatings, as a Latin lesson in a Renaissance grammar school,this Julius Caesar lends itself particularly well to the Globe’s pursuit of authentic Elizabethan revivals.
At times, though, I felt that this also circumscribed the reach of this production, leaving it sometimes feeling a little tightly-leashed to the (modified) history-books. Perhaps Gregory Doran and Phyllida Lloyd’s recent productions (set in a recognisably modern necklacing-rife Africa and a women’s prison respectively) have rather spoiled us when it comes to imaginative retellings of Caesar. But, precisely because the play is so much about the power of words, I felt that the splendidly-delivered orations in this production could have been balanced out by more of those startling moments like the unveiling of Strato as Caesar, and of course that giant swinging cow.