I found the debate between Cassius and Brutus to be particularly sensitive: the most alive material that we dealt with.

How did you stage the assassination itself?

Hall: One of the big problems with the play is blood: there’s an awful lot of it and once it gets on the stage, from a practical point of view it gets very sticky. And I wanted a lot of blood. There’s blood on people’s hands, they talk about the blood and how you can smell it; it’s very, very important, especially for what happens afterward. I had Caesar in his chair and there was a very white, perspex sheet that the chair was on that went up the back of the RST and up into the fly floor with a picture of Caesar on it. It was like a beautiful big piece of scenery, but when he was murdered we could chuck blood all over it, because we then dropped it from the fly floor and dragged it off stage and all the blood was gone when we wanted it to be. It was very violent and very bloody and you saw that he ended up being stabbed again and again and again, and everybody had to have a hand in it. It was violent, sodden, and very bloody.

Farr: The murder was brutal and dirty and messy and, very much because of the costumes, the men in suits, and the sense that Caesar was clearly conducting some kind of high-level cabinet meeting, it felt political and it took place in real life. I was looking for a level of ritual as well, when they dip their hands in the blood of Caesar. The blood was not naturalistic because the whole play was not presented in that naturalistic way: there was a bucket of blood brought on and there was a strange ritualistic quality to that which counterpointed the more grubby realism of the actual killing. Because there was so much blood people could dip their hands in, and this emphasized the sacrificial quality of the killing, which was very effective.

Bailey: Our one piece of physical set was the plinth that Caesar ascends just before his assassination. It looked like a slab of marble fit for slaughter. Our idea was that the assassins would appear like wolves from the dark and leap onto the plinth. Caesar fights back with amazing ferocity. Greg Hicks, who acted Caesar, made this moment very believable—being lithe and athletic. The grand historical assassination that the conspirators imagined degenerates into frantic butchery. Brutus waits for an opportunity to kill him in a memorable and meaningful way, but finally scrabbles up the steps, pushing the manic killers aside, and grabs the body from them. The moment is not heroic, just ghastly.

How, with a limited number of actors, did you go about creating the mob scenes?

Hall: We put the actors all over the theater. I personally can’t imagine that scene being done any other way than using your audience as the crowd, and I am sure that’s what would have happened when Shakespeare did it; several hundred people hopefully (unless it’s a Tuesday matinee!), and you get them for free. So we had actors out in the audience at different points shouting and jeering. The audience weren’t invited to join in—because why would they?—but they certainly enabled the rebels and Antony to directly address the audience with the corpse of Caesar, and talk to those various different actors dotted around the building. They were positioned up in the gallery and would shout down at the stage. They had iron bars, which they banged on bits of the auditorium—I think we damaged the poor old RST at some point—and then we had one of the crowd come in on a rope and abseil down from the balcony into the stalls as the mob made their way onto stage. It was a scene that we played directly out to the audience.

Farr: We started the play with every single actor charging onto the stage and setting the play up, bringing lights, video, etc., and then at the end of that sequence they were all able to leap onto the walls of this factory structure. With the exception of the two Tribunes, every single person, including the actors who played Brutus, Cassius, Antony, and Caesar, were the crowd. In a sense it was a Brechtian technique: you play those twenty people and there was no illusion of any kind that it was real. I can’t stand it when theater tries to pretend that nine people are a hundred in a naturalistic sense. There was a clear filmic way in which that scene was created, and if theater accepts the artifice then the audience are willing to understand. It’s about highlighting and accepting the artifice.

Bailey: Julius Caesar is a great ensemble piece as the plebs have such an important role. The first half of the play is predominantly a discussion between the people that rule and the people that are ruled, and it’s how you represent the people that are ruled that’s most tricky. I worked very closely with my choreographer and fight director to create a stage and film language for these crowds, mobs, and armies.