The struggle for freedom, the fight against tyranny, continues daily and so long as there are bloody coups, assassinations, rampaging mobs and wars, Shakespeare’s political thriller about power and its abuses will always be topical. In 1938 in New York Orson Welles played around with the text and updated his production to Modern Rome and Caesar was Mussolini. In 2012 Gregory Doran, faithful to the text, sets his production in modern Africa and Caesar could be Idi Amin, Mobutu Seko, Mugabe, Gadaffi and Maraback.
“How many ages hence/Shall this our lofty scene be acted over/In states unborn and accents yet unknown?” asks Cassius as the conspirators did their hands in the blood of the murdered Caesar. The cast is headed by some highly experienced black British Shakespearian actors, who adopt African accents and discover a surprising amount of comedy.
Paterson Joseph’s noble Brutus, who likes to see himself a “purger, not a murderer”, is the most naive of the group; very boyish, with a big open smile and a sweet accent, he looks like somebody who would make fatal mistakes all the time. Somewhat bizarrely there are only 7 people to hear his speech in the Forum. (100 years ago Herbert Beerbohm Tree could afford 300 supernumeraries for his production.)
Mark Antony (Ray Fearon), athlete, playboy, opportunist, luckily, has a larger crowd whom he quickly stirs to mutiny with his electrifying oratory. There is a horrifying incident when a poet is mistaken for a conspirator and the mob douses him in petrol and burns him alive. Earlier Fearon had had a tense scene, fraught with real danger, when he was shaking the bloody hands of the nervous assassins. Jeffery Kissoon’s Caesar, haughty, superstitious and deaf, carries a fly-whisk which he uses most wittily. A grandiose statute of him, Buddha-like in its proportions, comes crashing down when he returns as a ghost.