In the opening scene the Tribunes berate the crowd for forgetting their loyalty to their beloved Pompey, and cheering Caesar who destroyed him. I chose to extend the opening, fleshing out what Shakespeare has cleverly depicted in words with a more visceral stage picture. The Lupercal is a fertility festival and has its roots in the legend of Romulus and Remus and the violent birth of Rome. It is being celebrated in Rome on the same day as Caesar’s triumph. Caesar knows his victory over Pompey’s sons is extremely unpopular so he cannily turns it into a popular triumph by hijacking the Lupercal Carnival. This is implied rather than stated by Shakespeare. So we staged an amazing Bacchanalian and violent Lupercal with the wolfmen whipping women and segued deftly into Caesar’s magnificent triumph, the same confetti and madness in the air as affected the carnival, underlining the political maneuvering of this ruthless man.

Farr: Not at all. There are two things which you have to make clear. One is the notion of what a Lupercal holiday is—that is a difficult thing—and more important and equally difficult, because it is only related and not shown on stage, is the ceremony of the turning down of the crown: something that can be difficult for an audience to fully grasp. But once those two things are grasped, and if you can clarify exactly what they mean in your production, then the piece becomes crystal clear after that. Interestingly, I found in a contemporary setting the second half to be much easier, because I felt the whole notion of it breaking into civil war and the modernity of warfare very familiar. In the negotiating scene which goes wrong in the second half we used United Nations language, and suddenly the whole thing became alive and I found what everyone says is difficult about the play in the second half to be extremely rewarding.

What I found more difficult were Lupercalian celebrations and the sort of astrological chaos of the first few scenes, where they are talking about lions and that whole more cosmic Roman area. We explored that in a psyche-of-the-country kind of way and that worked to an extent, but as always with Shakespeare he was writing historical plays for his time. The difficulty this creates when directing is the overwhelming impulse to make it immediate for our time, but of course Shakespeare didn’t write for our time, he wrote for his time and so there is always a tension—a very interesting tension—that you do not want to just sit them back in the period, because he wasn’t interested in that. But at the same time, if you modernize thoughtlessly you are going to come a cropper, because he wasn’t writing for the year 2000.

And what about the specifically Roman stuff, such as Brutus adhering to the Stoic philosophy and Cassius to the Epicurean? Shakespeare must have expected most of his audience to know what he was talking about, but most of our audiences don’t have a clue, not having studied classics in school as every educated male did in Shakespeare’s time.

Hall: I don’t think that’s true. I think the majority of Shakespeare’s audience had no idea what these forms of rhetoric or belief were: most of the people who watched his plays were illiterate. The small amount of people who usually paid for the writing and performing of the plays would have understood that, but where Shakespeare is so brilliant is that you do not have to know any of these things to appreciate that one man is a jealous bear looking for revenge, and another man is torn so terribly because he has the ultimate liberal intellect and he understands every single angle of an argument. In a way that is Brutus’s curse. Stoicism can be confused with feeling relaxed about everything, and it’s not, and I think it drives Brutus into such a knot that his wife famously mutilates herself because she can’t bear the tension that he seems to be under. I don’t think you have to know anything about Stoicism or Epicureanism or any of those things to understand that. I think it’s an interesting sideline if you want to study more and I think it’s great for academics to expostulate on, but fundamentally it’s not something that drove us in the rehearsal room. What Shakespeare has written is a very strong, defined character and the lines and the action are an expression of his character and not of an intellectual idea. It may be that when you look back on it you say Brutus is a Stoic. But Brutus wouldn’t necessarily say he was a Stoic, and you don’t need to understand what Stoicism is to play Brutus. In fact it can be a hindrance that overtakes the role.

Farr: But that translates beautifully into modern ideas of pacifism and activism. Those ideas are timeless. The language in which they are couched might be unfamiliar, but you are not trying to give the audience a lesson in stoic philosophy and the ideas are crystal clear: the notion of patient acceptance of faith against those notions of fighting faith, and self-determination. Cassius is a phenomenally modern character. Brutus is difficult because he is a less modern character, but I look at someone like Barack Obama and think in a funny way Brutus is coming back in: the emphasis on moral center, on rhetoric, has actually returned after a period in which I feel politics was very much about delivery and about making the correct decision under pressure, and not really about ideology and morality. We seem now to be returning to these areas, so that debate is still alive now.