Julius Caesar
Barbican Theatre Winter 2001-02

This seemingly simple play is one of those (like Twelfth Night) that always gives the RSC unexpected trouble, and the first hour of Edward Hall's current production is pretty dreary. Things get a lot better in the second half, though, recompensing those with patience.

Your heart sinks the minute the play begins and you see the fascist-era setting and costumes, surely one of the weariest theatrical cliches in productions of this play for the past sixty years. Ian Hogg is an attractive Caesar, a tired but still valiant old soldier who has earned his vanity and pleasure in power, but everyone else in the cast starts off badly.

The usually reliable Greg Hicks, whose work I have admired since his spearcarrier days, is a wooden and totally external Brutus, relating to no one else onstage - his scene with Claire Cox's Portia might be a telephone conversation for all the human contact they make - and giving no sense of any mental or emotional journey toward commitment to the conspiracy.

Meanwhile, Tim Pigott-Smith just does his familiar slimy villain shtick as Cassius, giving no sense of what drives the character; and Edward Hall directs everyone to just stand still, looking uncomfortable, while anyone else is talking.

Things pick up after the murder. Tom Mannion comes to Marc Antony's over-familiar funeral oration as if it had never been spoken before, and resists all its pull toward rhetorical flourishes, speaking with an engaging quiet naturalness that only gradually do we realize is the feigning of an extremely clever politician (reminding you of the old saw that sincerity is everything, and once you can fake that, you've got it made).

And, almost as if someone else had directed the second half of the play, Hicks and Pigott-Smith come alive in the pre-battle scenes, giving Brutus and Cassius a warmth and humanity we haven't seen before, and evocatively conveying both their need for each other's friendship and their weary forebodings of doom.

It is one of the best playings of that sequence I've ever seen, and almost worth the price of admission in itself, though director Hall continues his new-found inventiveness by movingly indicating the climactic battle, not by the RSC's usual flag-waving, but by just having some weary and wounded soldiers drag themselves onstage.

Despite extensive cutting of the text - I noted the absence of one whole scene and large chunks of others - the play runs well over two hours without an interval. But hang in there through the lifeless first half, and you'll be well rewarded.

Gerald Berkowitz

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Review - Julius Caesar - RSC Barbican 2002