Ralph Fiennes in Julius Caesar - Press Reviews

The Independent
Eat your words Mark, this Caesar must be praised
By Paul Taylor
Published : 21 April 2005

If you think a production of a classical play should offer not an A-level essay in 3-D but a fresh, vibrant, imaginative vision of the piece, then Deborah Warner's stunning staging of Julius Caesar at the Barbican is the answer to your dreams.
If you think the job of a theatre director is to free actors so they can create fluently, and to provide an environment where they feel safe enough to fly from comfort zones, then this Julius Caesar is designed for you. (Goodness I'm beginning to sound a bit like Mark Antony - his crowd-seducing rhetoric is not just catchy but catching.)
Warner's modern-dress production begins with a bang - a balloon burst deliberately at the Feast of Lupercal celebrations. Here, performed on marble steps with the superbly orchestrated crowd of one hundred performers straining against the security barriers, this event looks like a cross between a movie premiere in Leicester Square and the start of the London Marathon.
Like a playboy star-athlete, the Mark Antony of Ralph Fiennes, whom I have never seen acting with such naturalness on the stage, gets giddily high on the frenzy of the fans. The soothsayer is a posh, squiffy tramp, elegantly wielding a wine glass.
Continually, you are jolted out of your complacent preconceptions about this familiar tragedy. The basic drift of the interpretation is that the plot to assassinate Caesar was far less well planned than is generally thought and that the disastrous, unintended consequences wring the heart because of their cost in terms of individual sanity and personal relationships.
Even by his standards, Simon Russell-Beale is brilliant as a combustible and deeply touchy Cassius. In the storm, baring his breast to the elements, he is intellectual Rome's answer to Gene Kelly in Singin' in the Rain, only in his version it's a case of "Come on with the rain/I'm UNhappy again". There's a scorching emotional abandonment to him that is partly comic.
The extent to which he has gone psychologically Awol is an index here of how dangerously improvised the so-called conspiracy is. And how irresponsible about long-term effects. Russell-Beale's puce-faced fury when Brutus agrees to let Mark Antony speak at the funeral and his huffy exit from those deliberations are a wonder to behold.
This much-heralded production segues superbly into the very different second half. In a wonderful touch, the body of the poet whom the rabid mob has butchered because he happens to share a name with one of the assassins, juts out from under the curtain that falls at the end of the first half. He's a harbinger of the human wastage that is the desperately sad preoccupation of the two last acts.
Greatly aided by Tom Piper's inspired settings, the production moves not just to a different key but almost into a new system of musical tone. The stage becomes like a vast bleak warehouse. Changes happen with unnerving suddenness - as when, after feverishly pulsing projection, there is an alarmingly swift downpour of domestic debris.
With Anton Lesser a compellingly tortured Brutus and Fiona Shaw all fierce integrity supported by an invalid's walking stick as Portia, this production is the most opulently cast since Joseph L Manciewicz's 1953 movie with Brando, Gielgud and Mason. Lasting three and half hours, it is also one of the longest. But that is probably only of concern to theatre critics such as myself with hardly any time in which to write what is clearly a rave review.

The Guardian

Julius Caesar
Barbican Theatre, London

Michael Billington
Thursday April 21, 2005

Often rated as Shakespeare's best political play, Julius Caesar rarely justifies its advance billing. And while Deborah Warner's keenly-awaited production is painstaking, detailed and full of what Cassius calls "worthy cogitation", it offers no blindingly radical new vision of the play.
In my experience only two productions have ever fully measured up to the play's difficulties. One was Trevor Nunn's 1972 Stratford production which, thanks to John Wood's mesmerising performance, finally exposed Brutus as a vacillating, tactically hopeless idealist adrift in a world of realpolitik. The other was Peter Stein's 1992 Salzburg version, later seen in Edinburgh, which used an army of 200 extras to demonstrate the way mob violence and anarchy can be unleashed by inflammatory rhetoric.

Warner too has a vast crowd of at least 100 at her disposal, but she makes surprisingly little use of them: they pop balloons and party during the feast of Lupercal, but there is little sense of an angry, swirling mob driven to mutiny by Mark Antony's oratory.
And, though the play is set in modern times, there are few political specifics in this production.

John Shrapnel's Caesar seems no more than an overweening, glad-handing party leader who knows how to work a crowd, curry favour and deploy a Bush-like gesture of "read my lips".

But there is no indication, either through thuggery or statuary, that he is really a dangerous fascistic menace who deserves killing.

I have a hunch that the politics of the play emerge more, rather than less, clearly when it it is played in authentic Roman costume. With period dress you also get a sense of historical perspective; for as Martin Wiggins points out in his excellent new Penguin introduction, the conspirators are "not just republican liberators opposing an incipient monarchy, they are also young conservatives hostile to social and political change". How often does that come across in a modern-dress production?

But Warner's version is well acted and has many solid virtues. And the best of them is that, like Nunn, she forces us to rethink Brutus. Instead of all that tosh about the noblest Roman of them all, in Anton Lesser's fine performance he is a choleric hysteric, more concerned with his own image than making the right decisions. Agonising under a crescent moon in his orchard, Lesser is ironical with conspirators and waspishly vehement when crossed by Cassius. Gone, I hope forever, is the notion of Brutus as a putative Hamlet or a decent pipe-smoking liberal. The man is a walking political disaster; and Lesser is not afraid to highlight his enormous self-regard and double-think. When he says of Caesar, "Let's kill him nobly but not wrathfully", one is tempted to ask what difference that makes to the victim.

Even after the assassination, Lesser shows Brutus cowering in quivering uncertainty: clearly the most neurotic Roman of all.

Lesser is also excellently partnered by Simon Russell Beale, who plays Cassius from his own point of view rather than Caesar's. Russell Beale makes him not some envious Iago but a man with a strong sense of justice, a capacity for friendship and genuine exasperation at Brutus's folly.

After Mark Antony has been licensed to speak at Caesar's funeral, Russell Beale marches up to him and says bluntly to his face: "I like it not." In Russell Beale's hands, Cassius seems a far more capable politician than Brutus, but one without the charisma that makes for great leadership.

Ralph Fiennes could do more to savour Mark Antony's rhetorical gifts: but what he does brings out strongly is the man's cold-heartedness as he sanctions senatorial deaths with a few flicks on his laptop.

And in a notably strong supporting cast Fiona Shaw makes a tantalising appearance as a disabled, disturbed Portia. Struan Rodger is a wonderfully sardonic Casca.

But, for all the evening's epic length, nothing can disguise the fact that the play loses focus after the Forum: the battle scenes, even when decked out with combat fatigues and played out in what looks like a vast military hangar somewhere on Salisbury plain, always seem interminable.

So Deborah Warner has not solved the play's structural problems or risen above her setting's rootless modernity. The best that one can say is that she has recruited a very fine company, worked in detail on the language, and buried for ever the idea that Brutus represents some ideal of heroic liberalism.

For that we give thanks.

The Times (Thanks to Eva for contributing)
Julius Caesar
Benedict Nightingale at Barbican

“OH JULIUS CAESAR, thou art mighty yet,” says Shakespeare’s Brutus just before he skewers himself. He’s talking of Caesar the man or ex-man, whose ghost has been balefully ranging the battlefield, but he might be talking of Caesar the play as it was revived by Deborah Warner at the Barbican last night. Her production is mighty going on mammoth and, at times, majestic.
It’s not just that Warner fills a vast stage with a cast that includes more than 100 swirling, celebrating, vacillating, raging, murderous and always scarily authentic extras. It’s not just that her revival lasts 3½ hours, including an interval so long you wonder if they’re dry-cleaning the modern suits that substitute for togas. It’s that she’s assembled a cast which, given the plot, is rather literally to die for: Ralph Fiennes as an Antony who grows in stature as the evening progresses; Simon Russell Beale as a Cassius who compensates for his built-in chunkiness by flashing the lean, mean, hungry glances Shakespeare specified; Anton Lesser as a Brutus deeply divided within himself; and, in Fiona Shaw, a Portia even more pained in mind than in her damaged, limping body.

Such is the revival’s size, ambition and anachronistic daring, you wouldn’t be surprised if Hannibal, complete with elephants, was time-warped on to Tom Pye’s set, with its fake-marble steps, glass walls and general look of an impersonal conference centre (a bit like the Barbican itself). But here’s the production’s paradox. It’s remarkably detailed — note how Decius Brutus nervously nibbles at grapes as his quick thinking lures Caesar to his doom — and subtle when it comes to evoking relationships and the nuances of character.

In his rumpled jacket and trousers, Russell Beale’s Cassius might be a Marxist don embittered by the undeserved promotion of a conservative colleague. He seethes at Caesar, dotes rather embarrassingly on Brutus and, as he shows in the great tent scene, is vulnerable and even weak inside. It’s a riveting performance, as is Lesser’s Brutus, a man who unwillingly decides he must kill someone he genuinely loves and remains desperate to maintain his purity of vision and motive despite co-conspirators for whom he feels aversion.

Fiennes runs onstage, waving so dopily at the crowd at the climax of the Lupercal games you see why the conspirators underrate him, but, when he launches into his spontaneous funeral-speech, first cautiously, then with growing assurance, you also see why he becomes the great Antony. As for John Shrapnel’s equally impressive Caesar, he’s a larger-than-life figure whose weakness is to fear seeming weak, whether by shuddering openly at Cassius (whom he scrupulously embraces) or by believing soothsayers and auguries of death.

The American-style helmets and battledress at a stunningly staged Philippi suggest we’re meant to draw contemporary analogies, but, if so, it’s up to us to decide what they are. The complex conflict between democrats with flaws and autocrats with redeeming features? Maybe. All I know is that Warner has given us an epic yet intimate Caesar, which, though sometimes over-elaborately spoken, is richer than any I recall.

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