Preview: Julius Caesar, Bristol Old Vic

Bristol Old Vic and the Bristol Old Vic Theatre School team up this month for a modern take on Julius Caesar, Shakespeare’s great study of leadership and rebellion. Any ties with modern politics, perchance?

Building on the success of last year’s King Lear, Julius Caesar will bring together theatre legends Julian Glover (Game of Thrones) and Lynn Farleigh (Pride and Prejudice) with the Bristol Old Vic Theatre School’s rising stars for a contemporary production of Shakespeare’s most famous political drama.

When Caesar returns to Rome a virtual dictator, Brutus and the pro-democracy senators foresee the demise of the Republic in the powerful hands of this celebrated general. As fear spreads and conspiracy is sown, Caesar’s days are numbered. Brutus wrestles with his conscience but, as measured argument gives way to murder, he and the conspirators must reckon with a new power led by Mark Antony and Caesar’s nephew, Octavius. As the mob burns Rome, and armies clash by night, the future of the Republic hangs by a thread. Can democracy survive?
Director Simon Dormandy can tell us more…

Scenes from the ‘Julius Caesar’ rehearsals. All pics: Mark Douet

“Can democracy survive?” How much are you drawing on parallels between Shakespeare’s play and today’s political/global landscape?
The echoes with contemporary politics, with populism on the rise around the globe, will be unmistakable. The production is set in a modern, Western state, with a design that evokes the sleek, glass, steel and concrete architecture of modern public spaces.
Caesar and the senators that eventually assassinate him are dressed in modern power suits; the cabinet that turns on him will include women in senior positions; and when civil war breaks out, it will be waged by soldiers dressed in both regular and irregular uniforms, familiar from our TV screens, fighting building-to-building through scorched and graffiti-covered concrete wreckage. There will be no mistaking the parallels between Shakespeare’s play and modern politics.

Aside from the power suits and graffiti, will the ideas and ideologies be familiar to us?
The gap between the elite – with its high-sounding, ultimately self-serving ideals – and the great bulk of the population, that we have seen opening up in so many Westernised democracies in the last few years, is at the heart of Shakespeare’s tragic vision. Julius Caesar depicts idealistic young men and women taking a fearless and bold step in an attempt to save an ancient democracy, only to see all that they hold most dear collapse, and the very democracy they risked their lives to save reverting to despotism.
That gap will be made all the more clear by the age gap between Julian Glover’s Caesar and the senators that plot against him, played by Theatre School graduating actors in their twenties. The blood-drenched chaos that ensues is a tragedy, both of misjudgement and of youthful over-confidence and passion.

Although loosely historical, does the play share characteristics with Shakespeare’s great tragedies?
Julius Caesar is a tragedy through and through, even though based on history as Shakespeare understood it. Caesar is a tragic figure, who falls because of excessive pride and spiritual blindness. So the key thing I want to focus on is creating a unified, powerful and moving sense of the tragic sequence – the towering moral vanity of Julius Caesar, but also his appealingly human vulnerability, and his genuine greatness; the perilous state of the Roman streets, on the point of explosion; the appalling choices facing the senators – to surrender their ancient freedoms or commit a dreadful crime; the sense of an inevitable sequence of events following on from their tragic choice; the dreadful waste of human potential in Caesar’s death; and the huge destruction, both in the material sense – Rome is literally wrecked before our eyes – but also of a golden generation that this brings, as the best men and women of Rome die in battle, often at their own hands, and Rome’s great traditions look set to fall under the grinding tank tracks of a new tyranny.

What’s it like directing a mixture of theatre legends and younger talent?
It could be quite difficult – but it has turned out to be a joy, thanks to the immense generosity shown by Julian and Lynn. They are wonderfully open to new ideas and approaches, and have plunged into the detailed exploration of the text as if it was as new to them as it is to the students. The students love working with them, and are queuing up for one-to-one sessions on speeches, scenes and verse-speaking. These students are completely open to anything they can learn from this unusual process, and have proved themselves outstanding interrogators of the text, promising speakers of verse, and absolutely committed actors, brimming with ideas, research, feeling and fun.

Julius Caesar is at Bristol Old Vic from Friday, June 9 to Saturday, July 1. For more info and to book tickets, visit www.bristololdvic.org.uk/julius-caesar.html