Free Julius Caesar by William Shakespeare Page B

place elsewhere stumbled and staggered in, crumpling to the ground—to the accompaniment of another sung Latin dirge—smearing the walls with their blood. 97
    In this production the formation of a uniformed and well-organized militia made up from Caesar’s entourage took the place of the traditional mob. At Antony’s oration they infiltrated the audience, shouting inflammatory remarks as Tom Mannion’s manipulative Antony whipped them up into a frenzy of hate, ready to exact his revenge. Many critics decried the fact that an essential element of the play was missing by the omission of the ordinary Roman plebeians. Indeed, there does not appear to be a production of
Julius Caesar
in which the handling of the mob has been universally praised:
    The citizens of Rome have a corporate identity in
Julius Caesar
that makes them as vital an element as any one of the leading characters of the drama. And the director who can’t manage them effectively can’t manage the play either. There are a number of alternatives, of course. You may use a large body of actors on zigger zagger lines and make your points by sheer weight of numbers. Or you may go to the opposite extreme and banish the crowd to the wings or even the audience. Or you may go in for a Brecht-like stylisation where a small group of actors is confined into a tiny space thereby suggesting by means of hemming in a small group an immensely larger one. 98
    This is all very well in theory but in practice these options, tried in their various forms, have failed to impress: large crowds of extrashave led to excessive “rhubarbing,” and when played by amateur actors, have not provided the emotional response required; the mob have been dispensed with altogether and replaced by sound systems offstage; and the audience itself has been forced into that uncomfortable role, unsure of the levels of participation expected.
    That ordinary citizens should be the ones who are manipulated into acts of extreme violence and civil dissent is an element of horror essential to the play. Violence leads to more violence, and Antony, possessed by the tyrannical spirit of Caesar, utters one of the most chilling speeches in Shakespeare’s canon:
    And Caesar’s spirit ranging for revenge,
    With Ate by his side, come hot from hell,
    Shall in these confines, with a monarch’s voice
    Cry havoc and let slip the dogs of war,
    That this foul deed shall smell above the earth
    With carrion men, groaning for burial. [3.1.289–94]
     … the chilling incantation of any extremist given the motive and the opportunity to mobilize ordinary people with petty hatreds and self-serving motives into violent expression.
THE DIRECTOR’S CUT: INTERVIEWS WITH EDWARD HALL, DAVID FARR, AND LUCY BAILEY
    Edward Hall , son of the RSC’s founder Sir Peter Hall, was born in 1967 and trained at Leeds University and the Mountview Theatre School before cutting his teeth at the Watermill Theatre in the 1990s. His first Shakespearean success was a production of
Othello
in 1995, though he used the experience as inspiration to found Propeller, an all-male theater company with whom he directed
The Comedy of Errors
and
Henry V
, which ran together in repertory during the 1997–98 season, and
Twelfth Night
in 1999, all at the Watermill. In 1998 he made his directorial debut with the RSC on a production of
The Two Gentlemen of Verona
, and would go on to work again with the company on
Henry V
in 2000–01 and, in the 2001–02 season, the production of
Julius Caesar
which he will be discussing here. Inbetween
Henry
and
Caesar
that year, Hall returned to the Watermill to direct
Rose Rage
, his (in)famous and celebrated abattoir-set adaptation of the
Henry VI
trilogy. He left the RSC for good in 2002 and has continued to work with Propeller on such productions as
A Midsummer Night’s Dream
in 2003 and
Twelfth Night
and
The Taming of the Shrew
in 2007. He became artistic director of Hampstead Theatre in 2010.
    David Farr is a