Free Julius Caesar by William Shakespeare Page A

appears to have a real relish for violence. The show memorably captures the baying, brainless belligerence of the mob, and the scene in which they lay into the gentle poet Cinna is almost unwatchable in its sadistic ferocity. And, far from carving Caesar as a dish fit for the gods, the assassination is lingeringly, almost longingly presented like a scene in a “slasher” horror movie, with lashings of blood with which the conspirators smear their faces as well as their hands. 91
    The play’s obsession with methods of suicide and slow inflictions of death has never been so marked. Caesar’s extended knifing is a messy kill at the bullfight. Cinna the Poet is torn to pieces together with his verses. The architectural corridor of Rome is replaced in a long interval by the sarcophagus of Sardis and Philippi. Here soldiers lie down and cringe in trench helmets like frozen figures in a First World War memorial sculpture. 92
    Taken to another level of experience,
    David Thacker’s presentation of the assassination scene made the audience feel uncomfortably close to the action. The conspirators ominously emerged from the audience one by one and in a trance-like series of moves advanced towards Caesar and stabbed him. Caesar who was reduced to his knees finally grabbed Brutus by the legs and looked into his eyes before uttering
“Et tu, Brute?”
All of the conspirators avoided making eye contact with the audience in the moments after, as Caesar’s body was wheeled out on a hospital trolley. 93
    Peter Hall’s 1995 production was not well received but was particularly noted for the fact that
    Visible blood provided a recurring motif: it spurted from the joint between Caesar’s neck and shoulder after Casca stabbed him; there was plentiful blood on the hands and swords of the conspirators after the assassination; it spurted from Cinna the Poet after the mob had stabbed and beaten him to death; a bucket of blood was poured down the steps after the mob scene; Caesar’s corpse, on display, was stained red with blood; Octavius’s face, in battle was streaked with blood; blood streamed down the face of the vast effigy of Caesar at the end of the play. 94
    The stage became a nightmarish place of paranoia and disorder, in which an uncanny atmosphere foreboded the imminent threat of physical violence:
    Hall’s initial achievement is to evoke a Rome in the throes of a living nightmare. John Gunter’s sombre, panelled set is dominated by a giant mask of Caesar, Guy Woolfenden’s eerie chords fill the air with a sense of omen, and public figures are beset by private fears. Christopher Benjamin’s Caesar starts nervously on being accosted by a soothsayer, and John Nettles’s Brutus gazes into the sultry pit where the feast of Lupercal is taking place with the horror of a man witnessing the birth of a dictatorship. 95
    In Edward Hall’s production in 2000, the removal of Caesar was equated with the removal of Rome’s heart and the slow death of the body politic:
    Hall made some extraordinary decisions … omitting the first scene of tribunes and plebeians altogether, replacing it with an initial tableau in which a reappearing ragged Soothsayer opens a small trap on the forestage to take out and display aloft a bleeding heart, presumably the “heart within the beast” [2.2.42] which augurers could not find for Caesar. Later, hung upside down in chains, Cinna the poet’s heart is plucked from his breast by a terrifying Brünhilde 96 figure—apparently thesame who has led Caesar in procession onto the stage at the start of act 1, scene 2, with a rousing, sung anthem to the “Res-publica” … in this production, woman as Fascist functionary comes into her own, on terms of complete equality to her male counterparts.
     … the battles as such never took place and there was no fighting. There was some marching under falling snow, some thumping on the earth with staves, spears, or pikes, until the victims of a battle taking