REVIEW: JULIUS CAESAR – ROYAL SHAKESPEARE COMPANY – STRATFORD

DONALD Trump should come to Stratford and learn the first lesson in politics – watch your back!

The Royal Shakespeare Company’s Julius Caesar is a perfect storm of power, politics, corruption and ambition.

This first in a season of Rome plays looks at the moral question behind (spoiler alert!) Caesar’s assassination. And how much his quest for power and ambition contributed to his decline and fall.

But it also features a lesson in how to use the spoken word to mould, influence and persuade the masses in two powerful speeches – the centrepiece of this performance.

Andrew Woodall is the noble, pompous and haughty Caesar heightening the tension between dictatorship and Republican government (discuss: modern parallels!).

Yet it’s Alex Waldmann’s Brutus who steals the show with a powerful display of someone with good intentions but bad execution.

Angus Jackson is directing all the Rome plays and he faithfully stays on script with Caesar including keeping in the unlucky Cinna (the poet not conspirator) killed for his “bad verses”!

Robert Innes Hopkins’ set is minimal but monumental with a huge centrepiece set stage for the two main speeches.

Waldmann’s stirring rhetoric by Brutus sways the crowd “not that I loved Caesar less but that I loved Rome more…” but it’s James Corrigan’s Mark Antony who wins over the mob.

We are all familiar with the “friends, Romans, countrymen…” speech and it’s a great counterpunch. Speech writers have followed how Shakespeare constructs these devices…the same patterns can be heard in today’s political arenas.

With this atmospheric, bloody and brutal production we are left with age-old questions. Did Brutus liberate the people in 44BC and was he justified? Was Caesar the father of the people or did Caesar’s lust for power lead to his inevitable downfall? At least, in the end, Caesar got the point!

There’s no question that you should catch this wonderful production of Julius Caesar which runs until September 9. Box Office: 01789 403493.

JOHN MURPHY