Julius Caesarneeds no 'updating'. It can still make the most thick-skinned politician squirm in their seat, writes Eileen Battersby.
Timeless and relevant. The finest plays of Shakespeare are both. As if by instinct, the incomparable Elizabethan possessed the art to shape a dramatic action that creates a world within the world. A stage under the spell of his words becomes an island, a storm-blasted heath, an enchanted forest, or the Rialto in Venice. The comedies beguile, the tragedies compel. It is Shakespeare's vibrantly lyric use of language, his inspired imagery and musician's ear and intuitive flair for characterisation that make his plays immortal. In common with the finest novelists, he also understands human nature: the ambitions, aspirations, fears, selfishness and honour.
Almost 400 years after his death, William Shakespeare (1564-1616), the poet who wrote plays, remains magisterial. For directors and actors alike, undertaking Shakespeare amounts to a theatrical endorsement. It is also an experience of psychological intensity.
Julius Caesaropens at the Abbey Theatre in Dublin tonight with a cast of 34 in a production offering its interpretation of ancient Rome. As ever, it is a play guaranteed to make even the most thick-skinned politician squirm in his or her seat. Jason Byrne, now 35, is returning with this Abbey production to a play he first directed 10 years ago with his company, Loose Cannon.
For him, it is a great play and a lot more. "I love it - I love Shakespeare - but Julius Caesaris a great play, it's very deep . . . It's about power, the dangers of power, ambition and manipulation, particularly manipulation."
Shakespeare's mob is often viewed with contempt, probably because it so closely reflects the fickleness of human nature. But Byrne sees it differently, he feels outraged on their behalf and speaks about the way the people are "played, manipulated and worked over" by the rhetoric of the politicians. The crowd in Julius Caesarrepresents the exasperated, bewildered public everywhere, the beat-like chant "We will be satisfied! Let us be satisfied!" adds to the menace shaping the assassination aftermath.
The people, according to Byrne, are always at the receiving end of the empty promises, whether they are being told by Hitler, or Stalin or Mussolini, or Bush, the current Fianna Fáil-led Government or any other leader, or party, one cares to mention. Byrne knows the play inside out, his battered Arden edition lies on a table in the rehearsal room, looking as if it has been squeezed to death. Having directed the play as a very young director, he is now, as a youngish director, returning to it. Why? "Because it has so much to say."
Byrne's wide-eyed, open-faced expression says even more. The simple truth is obvious - Julius Caesar says so much about human nature and politics in any society, that it is quite frightening.
Having got to the top by ruthlessness, Caesar has only one way left to go - and it is going to be bloody. The dynamics of the play are brilliantly choreographed through shifting emotions. Most intriguing of all is the way in which Shakespeare balances the politics (after all, he is the dramatist who told the story of the English monarchy through his history plays) with the supernatural, "Beware the Ides of March". A slaughtered animal, used by a soothsayer, has no entrails. Nature is in upheaval. A freak storm rages. Casca asks the venerable poet Cicero who as a senator is worried about developments, " Are not you mov'd, when all the sway of earth/Shakes like a thing unfirm? . . . Never till to-night, never till now,/ Did I go through a tempest dropping fire./Either there is civil strife in heaven,/Or else the world, too saucy with the gods/ Incenses them to send destruction."
Believed to have been written and first performed in 1599 (a Swiss visitor to London described seeing the play that year), Julius Caesardraws on Thomas North's translation of Plutarch's Lives of Famous Greeks and Romans, which Shakespeare would also consult for Antony and Cleopatra(1606-7) and Coriolanus(1607-9).
The play, Julius Caesar, opens with the events of 44 BC. The setting is an uneasy Rome. Already assuming lordly airs, Caesar, the all-conquering general, has returned to the city from a successful Spanish campaign. His ambition has begun to cause unease among those who believe in Rome's freedom. On his return, he was " thrice presented"a " kingly crown/Which he did thrice refuse"according to Mark Antony, but it seems only a matter of time before his mounting ambition will garner a crown and all notions of Rome as a Republic will die.
Distrust degenerates into hatred and his opponents, led by Cassius and Casca, decide to stop him. But they need support, particularly that of Brutus who is respected and loved - and close to Caesar. Brutus is the tragic hero, not Caesar. The conspirators win the reluctant Brutus, whose love of Rome outweighs his loyalty to Caesar. Lured to the senate house, despite being warned by a soothsayer and his wife, Calphurnia, not to go, Caesar is hacked to death. As early as Act III, Scene I, Caesar is dead. The conspirators are triumphant, but they are also worried. Antony, Caesar's friend, is not present and remains a threat. Cassius (one of the most remarkable characterisations in all of Shakespeare's work) warns Brutus " Do not consent/That Antony speak in his funeral. Know you how much the people may be mov'd/By that which he will utter?"
Cassius is right. Antony's funeral speech, one of the most famous in all of Shakespeare's plays, is more than a crowd-pleasing eulogy. It is a master class in skilfully subtle manipulation. "Friends, Romans, countrymen, lend me your ears;/I come to bury Caesar, not to praise him. The evil that men do lives after them;/ The good is oft interred with their bones;/So let it be with Caesar. The noble Brutus/Hath told you Caesar was ambitious./If it were so, it was a grievous fault;/And grievously hath Caesar answer'd it./Here, under leave of Brutus and the rest -/For Brutus is an honourable man;/So are they all, all honourable men -/ Come I to speak in Caesar's funeral/He was my friend, faithful and just to me;/But Brutus says he was ambitious,/And Brutus is an honourable man . . ."
Antony coaxes the crowd, step by step, as if he were leading a nervous animal. It is a key scene, culminating in Antony's deliberately reluctant reading of Caesar's will. Antony, Octavius and Lepidus form a triumvirate in opposition to the forces gathered by Brutus and Cassius. Justice and morality are central to Shakespeare. The murderers must pay for their crime and they do. Portia, the wife of Brutus, kills herself. Brutus and Cassius, defeated by the forces of Octavius and Antony at the battle of Philippi, also commit suicide.
The death of Brutus provides Antony with another oration opportunity: "This was the noblest Roman of them all./All the conspirators save only he/Did that they did in envy of great Caesar;/He only in a general honest thought/And common good to all made one of them./ His life was gentle; and the elements/So mix'd in him that Nature might stand up/ And say to all the world 'This was a man'. "
Byrne describes the Abbey production as "straight Shakespeare". There are no gimmicks. There are no togas. The costume design is more militaristic and, if not quite historically accurate, does convey a sense of ancient Rome. Shakespeare was often accused of introducing anachronisms - they feature throughout his work.
Byrne has no interest in staging Shakespeare in 1920s lounge suits. Shakespeare has a clock in Julius Caesar, and Byrne points to his own; it looks like there may be a gramophone in the tent on the field at Philippi.
• • opens at the Abbey Theatre tonight and runs until Saturday, March 17
