Julius Caesar

Abstract

Reviewed by: Julius Caesar Gabriella Edelstein Julius Caesar Presented by the Sydney Theatre Company at the Wharf 1 Theatre, Sydney. 19 November–19 December 2021. Directed by Kip Williams. Designed by Elizabeth Gadsby. Lighting by Amelia Lever-Davidson. Music and sound design composed by Stefan Gregory. Video design by David Bergman. Fight direction by Tim Dashwood. With Geraldine Hakewill (Mark Antony/Casca), Zahra Newman (Brutus/Lepidus), and Ewen Leslie (Julius Caesar/Cassius/Cinna the Poet/Octavius). Australian politics is blighted by a revolving door of Prime Ministers. Due to the quirks of our democracy, in which parliamentary terms are a short three years, and political party members can easily “roll” a leader in the face of another election cycle, Australia has had six Prime Ministers since 2011. Kip Williams’s production of Julius Caesar is well situated in this Australian context, where internecine party politics have been so ruthless that one former Prime Minister, John Howard, likened the leadership spills to the “Night of the Long Knives,” the 1934 Nazi purge of political opponents. But rather than only focusing on the results of (metaphorical) assassinations in Australian political culture, this production was also interested in examining a pervasive cynicism in Western politics at large, particularly the verbal and visual rhetoric that is used to mask or legitimize violence. Performed in the round on a bare white stage that looked like a boxing ring, the center of this production—both literally and figuratively—was a substantial cube made up of LED screens, designed by Elizabeth Gadsby. Over the duration of the show, the screens projected pre-recorded and live footage, stage directions indicating who was entering and exiting, text setting the scene (“OUTSIDE THE CAPITOL SENATORS PETITION [End Page 283] CAESAR ON THE STREET”), and montages of political icons and Roman imagery. The cube rose and fell throughout the performance, with the actors either performing around or underneath it. At the beginning of the production, the cube lit up with paintings of Tarquin’s exile from Rome in 509 BCE with text superimposed upon the images, giving the audience a potted history of the Roman Republic. The actors entered and walked around the cube, explaining the particular importance for Brutus of maintaining the Republic, whose ancestor five hundred years prior had banished Tarquin and in doing so overthrew Rome’s monarchy. At several points in the play’s opening exposition, the actors mentioned—albeit anachronistically—Roman “democracy.” It became clear to me that this production would follow in the footsteps of other recent Julius Caesars—such as Nicholas Hytner’s 2018 production at the Bridge Theatre in London, or the infamous 2017 Public Theater Julius Caesar in New York—that used the play’s interrogation of authoritarianism and republicanism to express anxieties about the steady backsliding of democracy worldwide. But whereas other productions of this play have been interested in the power of the mob or a particular blonde and coiffed American President, Williams’s Julius Caesar cast its satirical and critical gaze at two of our modern afflictions: the contemporary politician, and the smartphone. The floating cube was not the production’s only use of technology. For much of the play, the actors circled the stage, holding out smartphones which they used to video each other. Their recordings were projected onto the cube in real time. Seeing the actors’ faces magnified on the screens reminded me of Cassius’s question to Brutus, “Tell me, good Brutus, can you see your face?” and Brutus’s response: “No, Cassius; for the eye sees not itself / But by reflection, by some other things” (1.2.52–4). In the twenty-first century, these reflections, these “other things,” are our faces cast back to us on our smartphone displays. The smartphones were used to interesting effect when the characters were soliloquizing. When projected in tight rectangles upon the cube, their speeches became claustrophobic confessions. At times, I found the spectacle of the actors following each other with their phones outstretched as they passionately disputed Caesar’s assassination unintentionally comical or frustrating. Screen-fatigued after two years of lockdown, I felt my attention was constantly drawn towards the cube when I would have preferred...