Abstract

Deborah Warner's Julius Caesar sold out before it opened in London in April 2005. Watched closely by the media because it marked Warner's first return to Shakespeare since her 1995 Richard II and because it brought together a stellar company (including Ralph Fiennes, Simon Russell Beale, John Shrapnel, Anton Lesser, and Fiona Shaw), this production generated huge interest because it promised to put a 100-strong crowd of "plebs" on stage. But beyond exciting publicity, what did Warner's Caesar achieve? How far did Warner succeed in making spectators see Caesar as "a play for now," set at a time when the entire world should be looking "at issues of power and whether democracies can survive"? Reviewing Julius Caesar, Carol Chillington Rutter sees the fascination of this production in the intellectual, ideological, personal, and rhetorical contests it staged between three "now" men: Fiennes's Antony, Lesser's Brutus, and Beale's Cassius; she celebrates the clarity of direction that allowed audiences to hear the "speechcraft" of Shakespeare's play as utterly topical. But she also considers the images of modernity that Warner put on stage, images of "now" borrowed from contemporary war photography, and she wonders whether the director, in tying theater to the photographic still, limited performance to a language it does not speak.

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