Julius Caesar (review)

To make coarse use of the British vernacular, the RSC's JuliusCaesar was bloody bloody. Calphurnia's prophetic dream came true on the barren Royal Shakespeare Theatre stage, and no death was left to the audience's imagination. To open the production, the entire troupe swarmed the front of the stage—garbed in bright, colorful togas—all singing a celebratory song and many playing drums, tambourines and other rhythm instruments. At the culmination of the opening number, as the noise was reaching its crescendo, one actor held aloft a goat while another slit its throat. Immediately, the actors playing Flavius and Murellus came to the front to scold the public while James Hayes performed the meek role of the Carpenter before changing into his garb as Caesar. To punctuate the end of the first half of the production, the newly-ghosted Caesar walked from the brightly-lit front edge of the stage to the shadowed rear, his blood-soaked white tunic a dripping testament to the thirty-three stab wounds; the second half opened with Brutus emerging from the very same shadows, bloody arms upheld, carrying Caesar's toga, still bright red and glistening. Subtlety, thy name is not Sean Holmes.

From beginning to end, the most impressive aspect of the performance was the incorporation of music and sound. The stage, raked toward the audience, was bracketed on either side by musicians playing no fewer than a dozen different instruments, including flute, lyra, zurna, filimba, drums, harp, and guitar. By placing the musicians on both sides of the stage, Holmes and Adrian Lee were able to achieve a stereophonic effect, one that pushed the action along even as it provided eerie undertones—literally—to the sparse yet increasingly bloody set. While at times actors provided certain ambient sounds and vocalizations—including cries of anguish, clicks, and snaps as background for whispered onstage conversations and even sounds of war—it was the musicians who offered amplification, and at other times dissonance, for a given scene. When called upon for sudden, often surprising sound effects, the musicians were brilliant every time, creating eerie, atonal noises when conspirators met to discuss the assassination of Caesar or when the title character's ghost appeared in a pool of light at the farthest point upstage while Brutus paced in confusion and worry. The synchronicity of sound, light and action made for a sensually mesmerizing experience.

Such auditory masterwork was coupled with raw lighting—especially during the assassination scene, where the entire stage was under bright, white light and the assassins wore almost painfully white togas. Conversely, during the nighttime scene between Brutus and Portia, lighting was hazy and unclear, a fitting commentary on the dialogue. At times, the lighting was almost too generic, however, providing little enhancement to the final scenes of battle and suicide; in these instances, the stage was a general wash of light, illuminating in a practical manner, yes, but not in any deeper sense.

The stage itself was extended into the house by means of a ramp leading across a number of rows of seats and into the aisle. The possibilities suggested by such a scene design certainly excited a number of patrons, but I am not sure the device was exploited to its fullest potential. Only a few characters entered or exited from the ramp, and rarely at an important moment in the play, and almost no one stood on it for any extended period of time. Instead, the extra stage piece was, ultimately, pedestrian in a quite literal way: characters used it...