production has an all-black cast, and is directed by Gregory Doran. players do their best with this later material, though they are hampered somewhat by a minimalist staging in which we get neither the sense of battle nor the tension of a battle camp. Shakespeare then takes us into the less interesting matter of the conspirators’ fates, their various suicides and deaths by misadventure. A tight conspiratorial knot leads up to the assassination, which is followed by the funeral orations by Brutus and Mark Antony. This finely balanced ambiguity is the material for the first half of the play it is no surprise that Shakespeare’s coinage “misgiving” should make its first appearance in English in this play of doubts. That he waved it off with the self-promoting and self-abnegating line “What touches us ourself shall be last serv’d” is evidence of his popularity. He might have escaped assassination had he read the note proffered him by Artemidorus as he entered the Senate on the Ides of March. But he also has “popularity” in the sixteenth-century sense of that word, as the scholar James Shapiro has written: his rule is a radical democracy that is the very opposite of tyranny. “Julius Caesar” bristles with augury, but hinges on a more terrestrial concern: Was Caesar a tyrant and thus deserving of tyrannicide? The Caesar of the play is imperious and inflexible, happy to compare himself to Mount Olympus and the North Star. Too much can be made of this sort of thing, but Shakespeare’s love of superstition is rich soil for suggestible minds. The coincidence was theatrical in a literal sense, too: Lincoln died in Ford’s Theatre in Washington, Caesar died in Pompey’s Theatre in Rome, “Julius Caesar” was premièred at the Globe Theatre in London, and I watched it at the Harvey Theatre, in Brooklyn (where the play continues until April 28th). ![]() It happened to be on April 13th, the Ides of April, and a day before the anniversary of Lincoln’s death. ![]() It is clear that the political message is still the most important part of this play, and the RSC has beautifully made it the focus by taking away any walls that block it from coming through.I saw “Julius Caesar” recently in a production by the Royal Shakespeare Company at the Brooklyn Academy of Music. ![]() This enabled all audience members to identify with any characters they wanted. This, combined with a sparse set, and a lack of props used on stage made the actions and dialogue the sole focus of the audience. There was an amalgamation of pronouns, and the use of the word ‘man’ and ‘woman’ was not directed towards any one person. It was after this interesting start, that Shakespeare’s words were spoken on the stage. With a deep bass like a heartbeat ricocheting through the room, the whole audience could feel the suspense build up, as you notice Brutus and Cassius observe the worshipping of Caesar in the background. The opening, whilst without any dialogue, cleverly established how Caesar was the ‘leader,’ as the cast on stage began to circle him, dancing around.
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