Macphail Centre, Ullapool, 4 June 2009

Julius Caesar

BACK IN the 80s, when I was working at the Crawford Arts Centre in St Andrews University, I came to relish how student drama productions can bring a fresh energy and a different perspective to the classics. So I headed off to Ullapool in an optimistic frame of mind to see students of the Royal Scottish Academy of Music and Drama perform Shakespeare’s ‘Julius Caesar’ at the Macphail Centre. And my optimism wasn’t misplaced.

This visit to the shores of Lochbroom was the result of a partnership between the RSAMD and the recently formed promoting body, North Highland Connections. The programme for this visit was made up of two performances each of ‘Caesar’ and ‘King Lear’ and, despite being arranged at fairly short notice, both the schools matinees and the evening performances drew sizeable audiences. Indeed, the venture has been considered such a success that a Highland visit may become an annual feature of the RSAMD calendar.

For the students, it was something of an endurance test, as, with just a couple of exceptions, the same actors took the stage in all four performances over the two days, in two long and very demanding plays. Yet by this final performance they showed no signs of flagging energy, or uncertainty over lines. Moreover, ‘Julius Caesar’ was staged in the round (or, more accurately, the square, with the audience seated on all four sides). This is challenging for any actor, as without a set it puts a huge focus on their own bodies and, especially in Shakespeare, their voices.

Ah yes, the voices. As the conspirators stand amazed over the butchered body of Caesar, they speculate that this scene will be re-enacted in ages to come and ‘accents yet unknown’. Shakespeare didn’t know the half of it. This cast was made up of Scottish, English, Polish, American (northern and southern states) and antipodean actors.

Welcome to the diversity that is the 21st century drama college! Inevitably, not all accents are equally suited to delivering blank verse. Urban Scots, I’m afraid, doesn’t sit that well with iambic pentameters-too choppy and too little music. On the other hand, Shakespeare’s language can fit very well with certain American accents, which may after all be closer to how the actors of the Globe spoke than any version of Received Pronunciation.

But the audience had to make an even bigger adjustment than that. One problem with staging ‘Julius Caesar’ with a student cast is that it only has two female roles, which hardly fits the demographic of the average drama course.

We’re used, of course, to female actors pretending to be men (as boys in Shakespeare’s time pretended to be women, sometimes dressed up as men…), but this production took the convention a stage further and simply made some of the lead characters into women. And if you’re going to update Shakespeare to the present, then it makes perfect sense that some of the powerful figures of the play should change gender, in an age of Hilary Clinton, or Lara Croft, for that matter.

Still, it was something of a shock to see Cassius make his/her first entrance in a full length red gown, or to hear ‘Friends, Romans, Countrymen’ delivered as if by a young Olivia Newton-John, perched on the most vertiginous pair of high heels I’ve ever seen. But far from this being simply a pragmatic convention that we had to accept, it genuinely threw new light on the power struggles of the play.

The programme note raised the question of who is truly the protagonist in ‘Julius Caesar’, given that the title character is on stage for so little of the play. The famous 50s Hollywood version obviously saw Marlon Brando’s Mark Anthony as the numero uno, but the film is completely stolen from him by the subtle underplaying of James Mason’s Brutus.

Charlton Heston’s 1970s film doesn’t make the same mistake, not with Heston himself playing Anthony! But this was the first version I’ve seen in which the play is so clearly about the ‘lean and hungry’ Cassius-at least since that under-rated actor Edward Woodward took the part in a 1969 BBC version.

Gwendolen Einseidel’s Cassius dominated the play from her first appearance-driven, passionate, prickly, and ultimately dying a noble but pointless death, this was a performance that lived the part from the inside out. She was closely challenged for the laurels, though, by Hayley Miller’s Mark Anthony, who, for reasons I never quite fathomed, made his/her first entrance dressed as a Playboy bunny.

She rode the incredibly testing funeral speech with ease and intelligence, and presented a chilling ruthlessness as Anthony and Octavius carved up the Roman world between them. None of the male leads were as strong or as accomplished, although Mitchell Grant’s devil-may-care Casca reminded me of Robert Vaughn’s sly assumption of the part in the Heston film.

Eric Robertson played Caesar as a sleazy gangster straight out of ‘Sexy Beast’, which begged the question as to why Anthony admired, rather than just feared, Caesar. Matthew McVarish is clearly going to be a fine actor, with an imposing stage presence, but Brutus is not his part, and he couldn’t prevent the noblest Roman coming across as something of a pompous prig-a viable interpretation that the text can support, but not the most interesting view of what can be a very complex character.

Wearing a white singlet, and matched against Cindy Derby’s over-the-top Portia, they looked more like Stanley Kowalski fighting with Blanche Dubois than anything from Shakespeare-or Rome!

Like a number of Shakespeare plays (‘Macbeth’ is another), ‘Julius Caesar’ rather falls apart in its last third, but this production kept up the pace and momentum through to the end, when, in a nice final coup de theatre, Anthony and Octavius delivered their closing speeches to an enthusiastic audience of hacks and paparazzi. Shakespeare, this play constantly reminds us, knew all about spin.

For anyone seeing their first ever Shakespeare, this would not have been a bad introduction. The arguments were presented clearly and forcefully. The language was spoken, mostly, with a real sense of its meaning and impact. The production, as you would expect from a student cast, was physical and energetic-though it’s another sign of the times that so many of the students were clearly not straight from school! If this is indeed to be the first of many such ventures north, then the partnership between the RSAMD and North Highland Connections is to be warmly welcomed.

© Robert Livingston, 2009

Links

• RSAMD
• North Highland Connections