Julius Caesar — a fluid, but slightly flaccid, time-travelling Shakespeare full of intellectual bravado

Daily Maverick

a day ago

An adventurous reimagining of the Bard's timelessly political play aims for gender and generational fluidity but gets bogged down by laboriously longwinded lines.
I am definitely too dumb for Shakespeare. Just when I start believing that perhaps I've got a handle on the various layers of meaning that Stratford's Bard seemed to have been capable of juggling, some new and unexpected knot or twist or tangle reveals itself, completely destabilising my understanding of what he was on about.
Then again, the latest conceptually formidable (and intellectually daunting) rendition of Julius Caesar that's been brought to the stage by director Fred Abrahamse (along with a small cast of mostly men and one fabulously engrossing Fiona Ramsay) really strives to deepen the perplexity of what is one of Shakespeare's most enduringly political plays.
It is a heartfelt, highly ambitious conceptual reframing of the play about one of history's most famous political assassinations, and it is clever, even if that cleverness gets slightly bogged down in earnestness.
Showing at Artscape 's Arena briefly before it tours abroad, not only does it overlay different periods in history, weaving past and present into a formidable postmodern tapestry that (much like the Tilda Swinton-starring film version of Virginia Woolf's Orlando, which it seems to model itself on) can feel quite a bit like you've dropped a cap of acid on a Friday night and consequently find yourself freewheeling and untethered down the highway of cultural complexity, the brakes cut and the vehicle speeding up, forcing you to grip the steering wheel ever tighter as you search for meaning.
Three time periods
Abrahamse's proposition is to muddle three time periods: the period when Shakespeare wrote Julius Caesar (1599), the time when its action presumably played out in a historically verifiable Rome (44BC), and finally, right here, right now.
The earliest and the latter periods are self-evident, but it's something of a masterstroke to also find ways in which to insert Queen Elizabeth I into the action, in order to draw parallels between, on the one hand, the plotting and scheming and inevitable aftermath of Caesar's assassination at the hands of his political rivals and closest friends, and, on the other hand, the Essex Rebellion against the British crown in February 1601. The overlaps and parallels and the unavoidable commentary on the persistence of political conspiracies throughout history are all very compelling.
It's a pity, though, that the action comes off as a little less riveting than the idea behind the intrigue. I say 'action', but in fact there's very little action to speak of in this thinking man's potboiler. Yes, there are moments — such as the slightly hammy moment when members of the cabal against Caesar pile in with their daggers and send Rome's ambitious leader into the afterlife — but, to a great extent, this comes off as a very static, very stagey play.
The action is principally conveyed in the words, and to carry off the conceit, the words need to be spoken and performed with purpose; they should ideally be made to plant vivid mental images in the audience's imagination, to make the invisible, talked about and discussed 'action' truly come alive in our minds.
That takes incredible skill. Fiona Ramsey, who is quite transcendent, of 10 times rapturous and also splendidly costumed and accessorised in this show, certainly gets it right. She slips between Elizabeth the queen and Caesar the would-be emperor with a mere slip of the tongue, and manages to hold the audience's attention and captivate its collective imagination with formidable ease.
She is masterful and, just as her costumes and make-up and accessories add gravitas to the characters she becomes, her vocalisation and full-body performance generates what feels like entire universes on that otherwise quite sparse stage.
The other actors have less of an easy time with Shakespeare, and in a number of scenes some of the characters seem hamstrung by the words, weighed down by the plodding, over-enunciated manner in which the pentameter is spoken. The actors need to get into their characters, disappear and take the burden of the dialogue with them. On the night I saw it (admittedly right at the start of the show's run), the ponderous recitation seemed to hypnotise rather than captivate.
A few of the choices, such as transforming some female characters into camp, masked caricatures, seem unworthy of the concept, have the effect of parodying entire scenes rather than meaningfully contributing to the production's stated interest in exploring gender fluidity by having actors slip into roles intended for the opposite sex. When Ramsey switches between Caesar and Elizabeth, the transition is seamless and decisive, when Thinus Viljoen disguises himself as Portia, it comes off as charmlessly camp.
A smart, compelling theatrical concept
On the one hand, this production has quite a few lengthy speeches that end up getting lost because they're spoken too dryly and with a lack of colour, and on the other there are moments when the dialogue takes on a sing-song quality, as though it's poetry rather than words imbued with life-force that's being recited; the boys in the cast should look to Ramsey for a sense of how to navigate the middle ground, and thereby illuminate the meaning of the words, while conveying their emotional depth.
For too much of the performance, I was engaged intellectually, being reminded just how dumb I am. In the face of such a smart, compelling theatrical concept, I felt somewhat relegated to some sort of emotional wasteland, grappling at the steering wheel in order to get a grip on the play's truth and meaning.
Time will no doubt help mold this potentially great work into better shape; the men on stage need to relax into their roles. The key may be right there from the start, which is the pre-set state of the performance: the men in a Roman bathhouse, sitting on the edge of a pool of water, naked save for thin sheets covering their vital bits.
What this play perhaps needs is for a more thorough investigation of the homoerotic tension that quivers and quakes during that opening tableaux. While the cast waits for the audience to take their seats, there's incredible drama in the simple fact of exposed flesh — as an expression of vulnerability, innocence and sexual desire, it's an image that's full of promise, and it should perhaps be better used to define and refine the ensuing energy of the play.
Instead, beyond the unfulfilled promise of the opening scene's homoeroticism, there are only moments of minor innuendo, but nothing sufficient enough to transform this play into what might been a gender-bending triumph, perhaps even a queer take on Shakespeare that the world could do with right about now. At this moment in history when gender and gay rights are under threat in so-called democracies,that would be a worthy investigation. DM
Julius Caesar is at the Artscape Arena through May 31, 2025.