Julius Caesar
The Barbican

IN 1995, Julius Caesar suffered a second and more terrible bout of backstabbing treachery.
This time the conspirators were the Qualifications and Curriculum Authority (QCA), who decided the set text had grown surplus to requirements, banishing it from schools – like Jamie Oliver and the Turkey Twizzlers.
Of course, this callous act was not an attempt to replace Shakespeare altogether. It was just that the QCA felt Caesar was not challenging enough a text for sixth formers. While the play is not particularly challenging, or all that engaging, it is unfortunately relevant.
A super power’s self-destructive pursuit of wealth, the politics of colonial conquest, the human cost of removing a tyrant from power, a leader who believes “the cause is in my will” – sound familiar?
Whilst Deborah Warner’s production is not particularly innovative, it does play around with traditional interpretations of the characters. Brutus is not the naïve do-gooder drawn into a mucky political assassination.
Caesar is fierce and imposing, hardly the frail epileptic the text seems to imply.
Simon Russell Beale’s Cassius is not so much the scheming Machiavellian, but a timid, bullied character, more resentful than envious of those who hold office. Ralph Feines danced about irritating as Antony. The masses get the inevitable bad press – more of a mob than a majority. Fickle and blood hungry they are swayed by Antony’s rhetoric like a hypnotist’s pendulum. Their mindlessness culminates with the attack on Cinna the poet – who is raped and stabbed for having the same name as one of the conspirators.
Shakespeare himself was no antiquarian. He imagined the characters of Julius Caesar wearing Elizabethan dress, and equipped ancient Rome with a medieval invention – the mechanical clock.
All attempts to familiarise these stories with our time should be applauded. Deborah Warner brings the events of 44BC crashing into this present, with mobile phones, televisions, rifles and modern dress – although she resists making any direction allusions to the war in Iraq. But other than a few clever touches with the ghost scene and casting the soothsayer as the drunk, there were few memorable moments.
Unexpectedly disappointing considering all the hype.

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Until May 14