Posted on 04/24/2005 1:30:49 AM PDT by nickcarraway
It must be spring: the big Shakespeare productions are arriving like cuckoos. At the Barbican, an all-star Julius Caesar; in the big Royal Shakespeare Theatre in Stratford-upon-Avon season, a summer of "The Comedies"; and meanwhile we await the National Theatre's all-star Henry IV Parts I and II at the start of May, Mark Rylance's farewell season as artistic director of Shakespeare's Globe, the Open Air Shakespeare summer season in Regent's Park, and a stellar West End As You Like It.
The Barbican Julius Caesar, directed by Deborah Warner, will tour internationally. Its programme carries photos of Tony Blair, George W. Bush and the war in Iraq, among others of the actors in rehearsal, so you almost expect to see them on stage too. It's a modern-dress production; nobody could miss the resemblance of its world to the one we follow on news programmes. But Warner forces no specific image of modern politics upon us. This staging is remarkably classical in its virtues.
And, in its reading of the characters and their political roles, it's unexceptionable. In so many plays, but nowhere more clearly than here, Shakespeare proposes that all rulers are deeply flawed, but that to replace them by force brings evil both to the state and to usurpers. John Shrapnel's Caesar is a presidential ruler surrounded by security guards and political favourites, but one who enjoys a public display of sensual riot; Simon Russell Beale's Cassius is a shambling boffin whose unhappiness with the political scene gives him a rasping anger and chafing discontent; Anton Lesser's distinguished but febrile Brutus persuades himself that assassination is politically correct; and Ralph Fiennes's Mark Antony is a chameleon - an exaggerated voluptuary in Caesar's company, then a sober political improviser, finally ruthless in his pursuit of world dominion.
The most wonderfully mobile performance of all comes from Fiona Shaw as Portia who (at last!) shows just what strange brilliance she is capable of. She has never been quieter; and, when she joins Brutus by night, she's intimate. Asking "Dwell I but in the suburbs/ of your pleasure?", she's wry, using educated irony to stir the husband she knows so well. Seconds later she rises to remind him she is Cato's daughter; and suddenly, with extreme simplicity, she is statuesque: nobility itself. Later, in her scene of anguish before Caesar's assassination, she somehow becomes the conscience not only of Brutus but of Rome itself: alive to the terrors to which her husband is making himself deaf.
Moment by moment, however, nobody else is quite so riveting. Julius Caesar works throughout only if it becomes Brutus's tragedy too: Lesser stays strangely untouching, and you never feel the nobility that other characters keep ascribing to him. Russell Beale, though he touches fine notes of compassion and pathos, likewise pales as the play proceeds. In quiet scenes, only Shaw knows how to let her voice cast a spell within the Barbican's difficult acoustics. When it tours in Europe, the production will work just fine with surtitles.
The Royal Shakespeare Company's new production of A Midsummer Night's Dream is an audience hit, comic and unusually picturesque. It also gleams from an intelligent combing of the text so that the designer, Stephen Brimson Lewis, makes us more aware of the characters' talk of stars and planets and the characters have jokes that are newly rooted in the lines. The staging is memorable above all for its Bunraku-style use of puppets. Fairy silhouettes and human shadows also abound, so that Puck's final line, "If we shadows . . ." strikes home.
But, but, but. This is the least spontaneous account of the Dream I've ever seen. There are reams of carefully choreographed comic business, the dynamics are archly slick, regional accents are exaggerated, the jokes are milked. And what suffers is the humanity of Shakespeare's characters. Gregory Doran, directing, reduces all the dramatis personae to two-dimensional sketches: after their first appearances, none of them shows hidden depths or surprises us.
Bottom (Malcolm Storry), who should be the most human character of all, becomes a mere comic turn, who did not make me laugh once.
The obvious thing about Someone Who'll Watch Over Me, Frank McGuinness's play about three male hostages trapped in a Beirut cell, is that it's surprisingly entertaining. There's an American, an Irishman, and an Englishman, like the beginning of a bad joke. Months pass; bad things happen between and to these hostages; the play ends on a forlorn note.
It is touching, of course: McGuinness knows how to press the buttons of sentimentality. Yet nobody in the audience is seriously upset or even moved, because the play is not serious about suffering or endurance. This isn't the fault of the three actors: we watch them with a glow of affection. David Threlfall overdoes the vocal surface of the English eccentric, but at a deeper level is marvellously resourceful and affecting; Aiden Gillen is feisty and appealing as the Irishman; Jonny Lee Miller is spellbinding as the American. Dominic Dromgoole directs. It's a feelgood play, with loads of charm. But surely it is high time Jonny Lee Miller, an extraordinarily touching and inspiring actor, was cast in a big role by a great playwright. Why not, for example, Brutus?
Shylock dittos.
So, are they trying to say Blair is Caesar and Bush is Pompy?
I'll believe that when Blair drags Chirac through the streets of London behind his Bentley - Tony standing in the sun roof in full Kevlar, waving to the cheering crowds in triumph.
Kerry is Claudius and TeRAYza is Gertrude.
[The FReepers collectively play Hamlet]....:)
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