Julius Caesar: Contemporary Razzle Dazzle that Captures the Heart of Shakespeare’s Play
Photo: Chris Miulka —
Brutus must never have heard the expression, “Better the devil you know than the one you don’t.” Otherwise, he might well have refused to join with Cassius and his co-conspirators in the assassination of Julius Caesar, an act that brings on the demons of civil strife and personal tragedy.
Then again, had Brutus heeded that expression we would have had neither William Shakespeare’s play Julius Caesar nor its engaging, if flawed, new version by director Charles McFarland and the Ottawa Shakespeare Company.
Mac Fyfe plays Brutus, the noble Roman caught between his love for Caesar and his fear that the man is about to turn the republic of Rome, Brutus’ other great love, into a dictatorship. That fear prompts him to throw his lot in with Cassius, an intense and convincing schemer played to the hilt by Michael Mancini.
Fyfe shows us Brutus’ rapid slide from logic into murderous unreason. However, he falls short when it comes to portraying the deep internal conflicts of a man “with himself at war” and his death at the end of the play is less moving for it.
Julius Caesar is played by Gemini-winning actor Eugene A. Clark. A man physically striking (he played professional football in the 1970s), Clark has worked primarily in television series such as Night Heat and films, including George A. Romero’s 2005 cult horror film Land of the Dead, in which Clark played a zombie named Big Daddy. McFarland’s choice of a black actor like Clark suggests he was looking for one more way to link the play, however loosely, to contemporary life, including the figure of Barack Obama. McFarland hints at all this in his program notes.
While hardly, like Caesar, on the road to despotism, Obama does ignite sharply divided views among the electorate and presumably faces assassination risks.
Clark, however, is not up to the task of playing Caesar, even if that character has a relatively minor role and is dead before the play’s halfway point. Wooden on stage, Clark declaims rather than giving voice to his character.
Much more successful is Brad Long as Mark Antony, Caesar’s slick and clear-sighted ally during both the leader’s life and after his death. Long’s delivery, as Mark Antony, of the “Brutus is an honourable man” speech, which turns the listening crowd against Brutus and the conspirators, is ironic, moving and a looking glass into Mark Antony’s own shrewd leadership talents.
Director McFarland, never immune to theatrical flourishes and determined to demonstrate Shakespeare’s continued relevance, has recruited Graham Rapsey to create razzle-dazzle digital projections and integrate film clips of the Arab Spring and other liberation movements into the action. Mostly they work; occasionally they’re distracting.
He’s also invited several audience members to be part of the Roman crowd scenes. Bad idea. Although this is a contemporary dress production, audience members are usually not actors and some of them on Wednesday disrupted our suspension of disbelief by looking distinctly out of place on stage……