Original Article: http://dartreview.com/archives/2008/03/04/letting_loose_the_dogs.php
Tuesday, March 4, 2008
Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar is a play that lends itself to political statement. I’m sure that my high school English teacher was not alone when, in the lead up to the Iraq War, he thought it an opportune time to teach this particular play. It came as no surprise then, when the Dartmouth Theater Company announced they would be performing Julius Caesar this winter.
Theatergoers will be pleasantly surprised, however, that director Jamie Horton decided to stage the play in a mostly straightforward manner—viewers don’t need the director to browbeat them with what the significance of the play is, or should be; they are perfectly capable of teasing that out on their own. To be sure, it wasn’t played completely straight, but more on that later.
In a purely historical sense, Julius Caesar straddles a shift in Shakespeare’s career. When it was first performed in 1599, Shakespeare had established himself as a promising playwright—based in large part on his divers histories of the kings of England, but the plays that would forever establish his genius (Hamlet, Othello, and King Lear for example) had yet to be written. In fact, Hamlet is thought to have been written at about the same time or shortly after Julius Caesar. The play can be viewed as a transition from strictly historical tragedies—like King Richard III and all three parts of King Henry VI—to the already mentioned epic tragedies.
Julius Caesar is accommodating to modern day performance not just because of the political overtones within the play, but also because its subject matter is well known to modern audiences outside of Shakespeare. The play is also laden with incredible speeches, too many to enumerate. A quick survey turns up many of the bard’s most often heard lines, for example: “Men at some time are masters of their fates: / The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars, / But in ourselves, that we are underlings”; “it was Greek to me”; “Et tu, Brute? Then fall, Caesar!”; “Friends, Romans, countrymen, lend me your ears; / I come to bury Caesar, not to praise him”; “Let loose the dogs of war”; and on the list could go.
Horton’s production has many praiseworthy facets. Above all, the actors and actresses spoke their lines quite well, an achievement considering that, in a post-show question-and-answer setting, most of the players admitted to having never before acted in a play of Shakespeare’s. The two chief protagonists, Brutus and Cassius, were particularly good. Christopher Smith ’08, as Brutus, started slow in both of the productions I witnessed, sometimes lapsing into mere recitation rather than acting; yet, as the play progressed he would become better and better. The confrontation after intermission between him and Cassius, played by Wheaton Simis ’08, was a highlight in both shows. Simis stole the show as Cassius, showcasing an adeptness with Shakespeare’s language. Simis plays Cassius for the sly and cynical political operative that he is, but gives him a sense of gravitas. The idealistic Brutus is lost, compassless, in the world of political intrigue, and the certainty with which Simis imbues Cassius informs the audience that Brutus’ idealism will be his tragic flaw. Cassius is often dismissed as the villain to Brutus’ hero, but after the show, Horton remarked that he intended that none of the characters be easy to dismiss—neither ambitious Caesar nor conniving Cassius.
The post-show question-and-answer session was held after the second performance with the cast and director. It was helpful in shedding light on Horton’s gendered take on the play, but many of the actors’ comments were borderline absurd. One such cast member recollected how, during the pre-production, she had reflected on how the lower classes were more politically aware back then, than those today. Nothing in the play bears this out, and, indeed, there is much that suggests the opposite is true. Take for instance the speeches by Brutus and Antony: the ‘lower classes’ are so utterly manipulated by pretty words that their ‘reflection’ is nonexistent. A riot mentality ensues, and the ‘lower classes’ knowingly sacrifice an innocent bystander to their cause. If this is what the actress meant by being more aware, then I count myself lucky that there is less awareness of this sort running amok today.
Jamie Horton’s most jarring deviation from the bard’s play comes in the form of his commitment to what he called “gender neutral casting.” “Women are at least as important as the men in this world,” said Horton after the show. A majority of the conspirators are female, as is Marc Antony. Not only do women play these characters, but they are forthrightly played as women.
Marc Antony is played by Meghan Wendland ’08. She played the part with adequate zeal, including Antony’s crucial speech following the murder of Caesar: its sly irony (Antony notes that his/her rhetorical skills cannot compare to those of Brutus—even though his/her speech is delivered in verse, and Brutus’ speech in prose) and cultivated understatement transitions the play from the political intrigues of the Roman Empire to the war for that empire. Wendland ably (if a bit thinly) delivers Antony’s speech, praising first Caesar’s reign while undercutting the conspirators’ motives and then nimbly baiting the crowd to a riot.
Elizabethan dramas had few large roles for women, and Julius Caesar has even fewer than most of Shakespeare’s plays. Horton’s solution is hit-and-miss. In the case of Marc Antony, having him played by a woman takes away something from the role—I’m thinking of instances like the touching of Calpurnia’s barren womb during the Festival of Lupercal, a touch that is supposed to confer fertility on her womb from the masculine Antony. At another time, Brutus dismisses the conspirators’ wish to kill Antony along with Caesar by scorning Antony as someone who is “given to much company.” What kind of company that would be, now that Antony is a female, is unclear.
Casting Trebonius as a female also changed the dynamics of the play, particularly his/her relationship with Cassius. Horton decided to combine the roles of Trebonius and Titinius, creating a larger role that is absent in the original play. In the later part of the play Titinius is portrayed as Cassius’ best friend and right hand, casting Christa Hinckley ‘08 in the role introduced some—previously nonexistent—sexual tension to their relationship. In Trebonius’ final scene Hinckley fawns over Cassius’ dead body, bright red lipstick and all, before killing herself such that her head rests where Cassius’ heart once beat. She herself admitted that the change in gender also substantially changed her character’s role, when after the show, she remarked, “the love for Cassius alters her in a way that I doubt would alter the male Trebonius.”
There is much to commend the staging of the play; however, the set and costume design left something to be desired. The Theater Department continues its love affair with scaffolding that started with the fall’s production of Hair. Even more baffling though, were the large disks that dropped from the ceiling during the Battle of Philippi. What were they? What purpose did the serve? Why did they look like gigantic shirt buttons suspended in mid-air sans shirt? These questions and more will have to go unanswered. Perhaps the most peculiar stage prop was the plaster horse stuck through with spear-like metal rods, which periodically made appearances on the stage. The oversized pincushion was clearly an allusion to something, but it escapes me as to what.
Julius Caesar will be the last production costume designer and professor of theater Margaret Spicer works on. Professor Spicer has been at Dartmouth for over thirty years and designed costumes for more than eighty productions. Unfortunately, the costumes for her last play were underwhelming. The basic component of every costume seemed to start with black jeans and a white t-shirt. This worked fine later in the play, when robes were traded in for black jerkin-like garments. But in the beginning of the play, the black jeans and robes didn’t come together well. The rabble were (logically, I suppose) even worse off—outfitted with cut-up grey sweatshirts to supplement their jeans. In Professor Spicer’s defense, with more than forty players involved, the cast was huge.
Other than parts of the set and costuming, the only other real misstep in my mind was Horton’s use of the Soothsayer, played by Sean Warnecke ’10. Horton enlarges his presence, setting him to the side of the stage at the end of several scenes. He is a glowering menace, costumed as some sort of drug-addled Vietnam veteran, complete with mangled foot, crutch, and dog tags. These affectations can all be looked past; more troubling was Horton’s decision to have the Soothsayer deliver the final speech over Brutus’ dead body rather than Antony.
This was the noblest Roman of them all:
All the conspirators, save only he,
Did that they did in envy of great Caesar;
He only, in a general honest thought
And common good to all, made on of them.
His life was gentle, and the elements
So mix’d in him that Nature might stand up
And say to all the world “This was a man!”
This makes the Soothsayer, who according to Warnecke metaphorically represents history repeating itself, the solemn voice of wisdom in the play. But it also subtly robs Antony the roundness of his character, without the final speech he is merely a political operator on the level of Cassius, something certainly not intended by Shakespeare and curious in light of Horton’s commitment to keep the various shades of grey in the play.
“I wanted to do a highly political play in a highly political year. . .Shakespeare is just as relevant now as he was then,” said Horton after the show. Fortunately, he let the play stand on its own two legs, declining some of the recently used gimmicks highlighted in the Dramaturgs’ Notes (some recent productions of Julius Caesar have made Caesar into a Che Guevara type, put the senators into fat suits, and placed metal detectors on the stage). Horton allows the play to speak for itself, and it speaks magnificently. n