However, the effectiveness of Shakespeare’s writing of the assassination scene, in which an all-too-mortal and defenseless man is brutally stabbed in front of our eyes, cannot help but make our attitude ambivalent to the conspirators’ actions. The similarities lie in what “regicide” unleashes, and this has become a major concern of the modern director. Could the conspirators ever succeed with such a murder on their hands and conscience? In the last fifty years there has been increased savagery in the depiction of violence and the use of blood as the major symbol of the play’s thematic concerns. From a play that was considered Stoic and wordy, Julius Caesar has progressed into something much more visceral. In 1991 Steven Pimlott’s production paid service to modern and recognizable depictions of physical horror:

Pimlott appears to have a real relish for violence. The show memorably captures the baying, brainless belligerence of the mob, and the scene in which they lay into the gentle poet Cinna is almost unwatchable in its sadistic ferocity. And, far from carving Caesar as a dish fit for the gods, the assassination is lingeringly, almost longingly presented like a scene in a “slasher” horror movie, with lashings of blood with which the conspirators smear their faces as well as their hands.91

The play’s obsession with methods of suicide and slow inflictions of death has never been so marked. Caesar’s extended knifing is a messy kill at the bullfight. Cinna the Poet is torn to pieces together with his verses. The architectural corridor of Rome is replaced in a long interval by the sarcophagus of Sardis and Philippi. Here soldiers lie down and cringe in trench helmets like frozen figures in a First World War memorial sculpture.92

Taken to another level of experience,

David Thacker’s presentation of the assassination scene made the audience feel uncomfortably close to the action. The conspirators ominously emerged from the audience one by one and in a trance-like series of moves advanced towards Caesar and stabbed him. Caesar who was reduced to his knees finally grabbed Brutus by the legs and looked into his eyes before uttering “Et tu, Brute?” All of the conspirators avoided making eye contact with the audience in the moments after, as Caesar’s body was wheeled out on a hospital trolley.93

Peter Hall’s 1995 production was not well received but was particularly noted for the fact that

Visible blood provided a recurring motif: it spurted from the joint between Caesar’s neck and shoulder after Casca stabbed him; there was plentiful blood on the hands and swords of the conspirators after the assassination; it spurted from Cinna the Poet after the mob had stabbed and beaten him to death; a bucket of blood was poured down the steps after the mob scene; Caesar’s corpse, on display, was stained red with blood; Octavius’s face, in battle was streaked with blood; blood streamed down the face of the vast effigy of Caesar at the end of the play.94

The stage became a nightmarish place of paranoia and disorder, in which an uncanny atmosphere foreboded the imminent threat of physical violence:

Hall’s initial achievement is to evoke a Rome in the throes of a living nightmare. John Gunter’s sombre, panelled set is dominated by a giant mask of Caesar, Guy Woolfenden’s eerie chords fill the air with a sense of omen, and public figures are beset by private fears. Christopher Benjamin’s Caesar starts nervously on being accosted by a soothsayer, and John Nettles’s Brutus gazes into the sultry pit where the feast of Lupercal is taking place with the horror of a man witnessing the birth of a dictatorship.95

In Edward Hall’s production in 2000, the removal of Caesar was equated with the removal of Rome’s heart and the slow death of the body politic:

Hall made some extraordinary decisions … omitting the first scene of tribunes and plebeians altogether, replacing it with an initial tableau in which a reappearing ragged Soothsayer opens a small trap on the forestage to take out and display aloft a bleeding heart, presumably the “heart within the beast” [2.2.42] which augurers could not find for Caesar. Later, hung upside down in chains, Cinna the poet’s heart is plucked from his breast by a terrifying Brünhilde96 figure—apparently the same who has led Caesar in procession onto the stage at the start of act 1, scene 2, with a rousing, sung anthem to the “Res-publica” … in this production, woman as Fascist functionary comes into her own, on terms of complete equality to her male counterparts.

 … the battles as such never took place and there was no fighting. There was some marching under falling snow, some thumping on the earth with staves, spears, or pikes, until the victims of a battle taking place elsewhere stumbled and staggered in, crumpling to the ground—to the accompaniment of another sung Latin dirge—smearing the walls with their blood.97

In this production the formation of a uniformed and well-organized militia made up from Caesar’s entourage took the place of the traditional mob. At Antony’s oration they infiltrated the audience, shouting inflammatory remarks as Tom Mannion’s manipulative Antony whipped them up into a frenzy of hate, ready to exact his revenge. Many critics decried the fact that an essential element of the play was missing by the omission of the ordinary Roman plebeians. Indeed, there does not appear to be a production of Julius Caesar in which the handling of the mob has been universally praised:

The citizens of Rome have a corporate identity in Julius Caesar that makes them as vital an element as any one of the leading characters of the drama. And the director who can’t manage them effectively can’t manage the play either. There are a number of alternatives, of course. You may use a large body of actors on zigger zagger lines and make your points by sheer weight of numbers. Or you may go to the opposite extreme and banish the crowd to the wings or even the audience. Or you may go in for a Brecht-like stylisation where a small group of actors is confined into a tiny space thereby suggesting by means of hemming in a small group an immensely larger one.98

This is all very well in theory but in practice these options, tried in their various forms, have failed to impress: large crowds of extras have led to excessive “rhubarbing,” and when played by amateur actors, have not provided the emotional response required; the mob have been dispensed with altogether and replaced by sound systems offstage; and the audience itself has been forced into that uncomfortable role, unsure of the levels of participation expected.

That ordinary citizens should be the ones who are manipulated into acts of extreme violence and civil dissent is an element of horror essential to the play. Violence leads to more violence, and Antony, possessed by the tyrannical spirit of Caesar, utters one of the most chilling speeches in Shakespeare’s canon:

And Caesar’s spirit ranging for revenge,

With Ate by his side, come hot from hell,

Shall in these confines, with a monarch’s voice

Cry havoc and let slip the dogs of war,

That this foul deed shall smell above the earth

With carrion men, groaning for burial. [3.1.289–94]

 … the chilling incantation of any extremist given the motive and the opportunity to mobilize ordinary people with petty hatreds and self-serving motives into violent expression.

THE DIRECTOR’S CUT: INTERVIEWS WITH EDWARD HALL, DAVID FARR, AND LUCY BAILEY

Edward Hall, son of the RSC’s founder Sir Peter Hall, was born in 1967 and trained at Leeds University and the Mountview Theatre School before cutting his teeth at the Watermill Theatre in the 1990s. His first Shakespearean success was a production of Othello in 1995, though he used the experience as inspiration to found Propeller, an all-male theater company with whom he directed The Comedy of Errors and Henry V, which ran together in repertory during the 1997–98 season, and Twelfth Night in 1999, all at the Watermill. In 1998 he made his directorial debut with the RSC on a production of The Two Gentlemen of Verona, and would go on to work again with the company on Henry V in 2000–01 and, in the 2001–02 season, the production of Julius Caesar which he will be discussing here. In between Henry and Caesar that year, Hall returned to the Watermill to direct Rose Rage, his (in)famous and celebrated abattoir-set adaptation of the Henry VI trilogy.