As the current election campaign turns ever nastier, ROBERT LIVINGSTON gets a taste of power politics two thousand years ago in the first of two visiting Royal Shakespeare Company productions at Forres.

THE CAST wear designer togs, leather jackets, shades, and combat fatigues. The programme booklet features images of Berlusconi, Bush, Putin.  Video images of the Iraq War flicker on back-projection screens.  I don’t think we’re in Ancient Rome, Toto.

This Royal Shakespeare Company’s touring production of Julius Caesar is blatantly, almost relentlessly, up to the minute.  It could have been irritatingly trendy, or even condescending: ‘young people just won’t relate to tunics and togas’.  But it wasn’t.  David Farr’s production is so clear, so vivid, and so forceful, that Shakespeare’s canny dissection of personal ambition, honour, and the compromises of power politics, comes over as astonishingly immediate and relevant.

For the actor in the title role, Julius Caesar is a difficult play: Caesar is dead before the mid-point, and he has only a handful of scenes in which to dominate the whole play, to ensure that when his ghost appears to Brutus before the final battle, it is a fitting echo of that ‘colossus’ who ‘doth bestride the world’.

Christopher Saul plays Caesar as a shambling bear of a man, driven by rages, fears, and an overweening sense of his own importance.  This is no chilly, distant figure of authority.  If the recent German film Downfall can be accused of ‘humanising’ Hitler, then this production also humanises an earlier tyrant.

It is easy to see why the conspirators fear Caesar’s ambition, but it is also possible—and this is not always the case—to see why they have loved him, and why the idea of killing him could be so abhorrent.

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“Updating the production does not, in this case, mean gabbling what Shakespeare wrote in a misguided attempt to give a sense of urgency and immediacy”

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Shakespeare is remarkably even-handed and nonjudgemental, and that is what makes his analysis of the political mind so astute.  Nothing is black and white.  If there is a villain in this play, it is Mark Anthony, who by the end has far exceeded the conspirators’ original fears of Caesar in his own ruthless pursuit of power at all costs.  But even he is shown to be driven by a sincere passion to avenge the murder of his patron and friend.

If there is a hero, it is usually Brutus, ‘the noblest Roman of them all’, reluctantly joining the murder plot out of the highest sense of honour, and of the good of the state, and persuaded to it by the harsh realist, Cassius.  But in this production it is the tormented, passionate Cassius of Adrian Schiller who is ultimately the more sympathetic figure, and whose unnecessary suicide (mistaking victory for defeat) that touches us most.

Zubin Varla’s Brutus—measured, considered, rational, honest—is shown to be, despite himself, the constant cause of disaster: it is his decision which allows Mark Antony to speak, and so turn the mob against the conspirators.  Brutus is devastated by his wife’s suicide, but his own neglect has driven her to the act, and, finally, his own sense of superior wisdom commits the allies to a disastrous battle in which, by giving Mark Antony the victory, they pave the way for a tyranny greater than Caesar’s.

The contemporary parallels, therefore, are neither forced nor superficial.  Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it, said the philosopher Santayana, and that seems to be the underlying message of this gripping production.

These RSC touring productions are explicitly designed for audiences which may not have many opportunities to see Shakespeare on stage, and therefore may not know the plays well in advance. Like the previous production seen in Forres two years ago, of The Merchant of Venice, this Julius Caesar is lucid, straightforward, direct, and well-paced.

As in that previous production, the verse is spoken in a clear, thoughtful, and measured way, allowing time for the richness of the language, and the subtlety of the arguments, to sink in.  Updating the production does not, in this case, mean gabbling what Shakespeare wrote in a misguided attempt to give a sense of urgency and immediacy.

The most obvious example is Gary Oliver’s delivery of Mark Antony’s most famous speech—‘Friends, Romans, Countrymen’. This becomes on the one hand almost an operatic aria in its richness of tone and expression, and on the other the most cunning and manipulative party political broadcast you’ll ever see.

Like so many of Shakespeare’s plays, Julius Caesar comes full circle.  Mark Antony’s brutal blood bath, in the end, has done nothing more than pave the way for Caesar’s true successor, his adopted son Octavius, the man who, under the name Augustus, finally destroyed the Roman Republic.  As the crowds cheer, and the video images flicker, this production’s final images leave us in no doubt of the dangers of allowing history to repeat itself.

© Robert Livingston, 2005