You blocks, you stones, you worse than senseless things!

An analysis of the depiction of the mob in last decade UK productions of Shakespeares

Julius Caesar.

Introduction.
When tackling last decade reviews of Shakespeares Julius Caesar UK productions,
the self-appointed young researcher will inevitably come across the shared assumption that
this particular play is hardly an audience favourite and possibly not even one of
Shakespeares best works. Charles Spencer opens his reviews of last years Globe
production by stating that Julius Caesar isn't one of Shakespeare's more loveable plays1
while Fiona Mountford goes as far as to ask the RSC new artistic director Gregory Doran to
please [...] give this play a short rest2 when reviewing his own take at the play in 2012. Yet,
with a rate of six major British productions in ten years (plus at least a visiting Italian
production staged for the Globe to Globe Festival during the 2012 olympic celebrations),
some of which subsequently toured around the country and in Europe, the play has evidently
taken the stage quite extensively, despite this poor reputation.
Critics, theatregoers and scholars alike have always found it incredibly hard to clearly
define the play and its performance history proves this, showing wavering attitudes over the
centuries, indecisively trying to assess whose tragedy it finally is. Notoriously, in fact, the title
character is killed when the play has just hit its third act, leaving the other characters to deal
with the final consequences of the gory deed. Following the lead of Andrew Hartleys notable
performance history book (Julius Caesar, 2014), this brief essay aims to analyse Julius
Caesar UK productions staged in the past ten years, putting them into their own
socio-cultural frame by focusing especially on one specific feature, i.e. the depiction of the
crowd on stage.
This play can boast a numerous cast of characters but to talk of the crowd actually
means to talk about extras and secondary roles with little or no lines at all. Nonetheless, the
crowd as a whole might be considered as one character of its own and past productions
have variously granted it a more or less central role in the plays staging. Famously, in his
1937 production at the Mercury Theatre, Orson Welles discarded the 19th Century tradition
which wanted Julius Caesar to be the tragedy of heroic noble men and put the mob under
the spotlight, depicting it as a mindless, violent and fickle multitude disquietedly showing on

1
Charles Spencer, Julius Caesar, Shakespeares Globe, review: 'suits the Globe to a tee', The
Telegraph, 04 July 2014.
2
Fiona Mountford, When not in Rome...: Setting Julius Caesar in war-torn Africa proves a revelation,
The Observer, 07 June 2012.
stage the effects of populist fascism. Later productions have thus swayed between these two
traditions, eventually yielding to a more complex and politicised depiction of the crowd in
recent times.

The crowd features in three major scenes3 which will be the focus of this study: the
opening scene (1.1), the Forum scene (3.2) and the so-called Cinna the Poet scene (3.3).
The play opens on the people of Rome themselves noisily celebrating Caesars
triumph over Pompey in the streets moments before the arrival of Flavius and Marullus, two
tribunes of the plebs, who engage in a conversation with a bright cobbler; enraged by the
mans cheekiness, the two statesmen passionately scold the crowd for their inconstancy and
finally dismiss the multitude. The scene is generally regarded as an indicator of the mobs
complexity, it being depicted not only as a senseless horde but as formed by quick-minded
individuals.
The next heavy-crowded scene, the Forum scene, is a central one, both structurally
and for the value most modern productions attach to it. Caesar has just met his death at the
hands of the conspirators and Brutus walks into the marketplace to offer the populace a
satisfactory explanation for this bloody action. Brutuss speech is closely followed by Marc
Antonys funeral eulogy for Caesar, which he is giving by Brutuss own leave; thus Brutus
first and then Antony engage in a conversation with the people of Rome, trying to convince
them, respectively, of the necessity of Caesars death and of the love Caesar bore for his
countrymen. This is a highly political scene and the way the crowd is depicted on stage
might stand for the whole attitude of the production.
The Cinna the Poet scene is the last one in which the mob features heavily. This
scene comes immediately after the Forum one and illustrates the turbulent consequences of
Antonys words; given its disturbing nature (a poet is lynched by the unruly crowd, inflamed
by Antonys funeral speech) this scene has been often left out in past productions as it was
deemed as possibly offensive for the audiences sensibility or contrary to the heroic portrayal
of Antony. As with the Forum scene or even more so, this scene can set the political stance
of a production and it is generally a remarkable one to be seen seen onstage.

This essay will deal with a total of six productions staged in the UK in the last
decade, presenting them in chronological order; each production will be briefly described in
its general features, the focus moving on to three abovementioned scenes. Extras are

3
Despite the lack of lines, the people of Rome are present in the Lupercal race scene (1.2) as well,
which introduces the title character and is thus often used by directors as a means to show Caesars
relationship with the masses.
generally employed as soldiers in Act 4 and Act 5 and this paper will briefly consider the
army scenes on some of the productions but will not go into greater details about them.
Reviewers often agree on the lack of excitement of the latter part of the play, Mountford even
conceding that if, in Caesar, you're not gripped by the first three acts, you might as well
leave at the interval, as four and five come nowhere near the febrile atmosphere of their
predecessors.4 While such an assessment may well be arguable, directors often seem to
struggle with these two acts and leave reviewers and researchers with very little to work on.
This paper explores the way in which different production choices affect the audience
and engage with ongoing social debates in the UK, if doing that at all. It being a brief attempt
at a performance history of a specific feature of the play, this study doesnt claim to be
nothing else than that, an attempt to contribute to the larger process of recording theatre and
its contemporaries for future readers.

2005: Deborah Warner at the Barbican.

One of the most typical (and yet potentially spectacular) ways of dealing with the
crowd in stagings of Julius Caesar is by employing supers. From the 19th Century onwards,
mobs in Caesar have often swelled in numbers, reaching the peak of hundreds of extras in
productions such as the 1812 one starring John Philip Kemble or the 1881 one staged by the
Duke of Saxe-Meiningen company in Drury Lane. Deborah Warners 2005 production follows
in this tradition of monumental Caesars. Hers is probably the most heavily crowded Caesar
in a century, with a cast of a hundred extras (40 professionals and semi-professionals; 60
unpaid amateurs) to feature in two major scenes: cheering the title characters appearance
at the Lupercalia and reacting to both Brutuss and Antonys speeches in the Forum.
The Shakespearean opening scene featuring Marullus, Flavius and the populace of
Rome being cut, the production opens nevertheless on the mob; a huge group of noisy,
impatient people wait for Caesars arrival at the Lupercal run, security barriers holding the
throng back just like a cross between a movie premiere in Leicester Square and the start of
the London Marathon.5 This multitude has been rigorously selected to be as varied as
possible; Nick Welch, a member of the amateur crowd of 60, recalls on The Independent the
selection process for some white, some black, some old, some young, some different, some
ordinary6 supers, the whole lot in modern dress to remind the audience of contemporary
London.

4
Fiona Mountford, Blood, no guts, Evening Standard, 27 May 2009.
5
Paul Taylor, The Independent, 22 April 2005 as quoted in Andrew James Hartley, Julius Caesar
(Manchester: MUP, 2014), p. 231.
6
Nick Welch, My life in the mob, The Independent, 24 May 2005.
 Despite the lifelike appearance, however, the populace is carefully instructed,
especially for the Forum scene; at some point during dress rehearsals, Welch reconsiders
his characters response to Antonys funeral speech:

I feel rather unnatural shouting and jumping around as Antony calls us to mutiny and
vengeance. I feel that my reaction to Antonys entreaties to "let slip the dogs of war" can only
be one of mute horror. I try out this new approach, convinced that not all members of the
crowd would have reacted in the same way, and quite pleased with the logic of it. I quietly
develop this idea until Joyce [the movement director] notices and tells me stop.7

This refusal to let Welch play his own version of the pleb stands for a clear directional
choice: Warners mob has to be clearly and fully in Antonys power during the Forum scene.
Reviewing the production for the Shakespeare Quarterly, Carol Chillington Rutter hints at the
possibility that the mantel Antony presents to the people during his funeral speech may or
may not be Caesars at all: Was that what Caesar was wearing when the assassins struck?
Surely not. Or maybe not. But if not, was it faked evidence, a sensational setup of Antonys
doing?8 Commenting on this chilling9 possibility, Hartley concludes that the crowd
eventually decides to accept Antonys word as true as it gave closure and a clear sense of
direction.10 This sense of uncertainty permeates the whole production and is, to Hartley, the
productions clearest contemporary resonance.11

The experience of watching the production was akin to flicking through cable news channels,
[...] each ultimately saying something quite different, so that the viewer feels overwhelmed
and, paradoxically, underinformed.12

Most of the reviewers praised the crowd as the most successful feature of the
production, some complaining (De Jongh in The Evening Standard; Dobson in the
Shakespeare Survey) about its absence in the latter part of the show, which was therefore
met by an anti-climatic ending13. The extras in fact never appear again onstage after the
brutal killing of Cinna the Poet, an exceptionally violent moment that lingered over the
theatres audience during the intermission, the poets body ostensibly left on stage. As
Susannah Clapp points out, however, [t]he arc of the production is true to the play: from

7
Ibidem.
8
Carol Chillington Rutter, Facing History, Facing Now: Deborah Warner's Julius Caesar at the
Barbican Theatre, Shakespeare Quarterly, 57:1 (Spring 2006), p. 74.
9
Ibidem.
10
Hartley, p. 233.
11
Ibidem.
12
Ibidem.
13
Michael Dobson, Shakespeare Performances in England, 2005, Shakespeare Survey, 59:1
(2006), p. 330.
busy, crammed space to emptiness14, thus making sense of a directorial choice some find it
difficult to explain.

2006: Sean Holmes at the Royal Shakespeare Theatre for the Complete Works
Festival.
Heir to Warners colossal Caesar was Sean Holmess staging of the play as part of
the 2006 - 2007 Complete Works Festival, the RSC's year-long Bardathon, a sprint through
all 37 of Shakespeare's plays.15 Reviewers generally dismiss the production as pretty
standard stuff16, regretting that the play's political complexity has been only partially
explored.17

Contrary to its immediate predecessor, Holmess production features only a small

cast of extras to play the mob and, oddly enough, never allows them the spotlight; the crowd
is in fact constantly half-hidden in the shadowy upstage wings, a device suggesting how the
focus of the show was never intended to be on the people of Rome.
The only time the populace is clearly visible on stage is during the opening scene, in
which a colourful multitude is seen gaily celebrating onstage. From the next scene onwards,
the crowd is virtually non-existent. During the Forum scene, Brutuss and Antonys speeches
feel oddly unnatural, more like an exemplary lesson in rhetorics than a crucial turning point in
the events. The supposedly unruly throng, in fact, reacts sheepishly to both orations, uttering
the lines from the text when prompted, never interrupting the speakers or talking over them.
When Antony asks them to join him around Caesars body, the mob frets but eventually
stays in the dark, the orator being thus left alone onstage to deal with Caesars bloody
mantel, clearly addressing the theatre audience rather than the crowd. According to the
staging choice, the Cinna the Poet scene is eerily underpopulated as well, the poet being the
only character clearly visible onstage, standing in a spotlight, whilst the mob is once again
covered in semi-darkness.
Commenting on the Forum scene, Billington remarks how neither Brutus nor [...]
Mark Antony [...] have to fight to gain the attention of the crowd18 and regrets the little
participation of the mob in the production, whose considerable potential he feels unfulfilled
by Holmess direction. As both Peter Stein, who employed half the Austrian army in his

14
Susannah Clapp, With friends like these: Fine actors aside, it's the crowd scenes that swing it for
Deborah Warner's epic Julius Caesar, The Observer, 24 April 2005.
15
Benedict Nightingale, Betrayal, murder, but not much excitement, The Times, 18 May 2006.
16
Ibidem.
17
Michael Billington, Toga party politics fails to ignite, The Guardian, 18 May 2006.
18
Ibidem.
production, and Deborah Warner have shown, he states this is a play that only makes total
sense if you feel a political killing breeds ungovernable tumult.19

2009: Lucy Bailey at the Courtyard.

Three years after Holmess take at the play, Lucy Bailey brings Caesar back to
Stratford with a production ostensively designed to distance itself from its predecessors.
Baileys direction grants the production a distinctive look, achieved by extensive use of
background video projections, and a new reading focusing on the core issue of violence.
Violence dominates the show from its very beginning. The production opens in fact
with an extra scene featuring two young men fighting onstage, their looks and movements
reminding the audience of two wolf cubs warily watched by a she-wolf statue projected in the
background while their blows grow more and more aggressive and are finally meant to kill;
the scene is self-evidently a reconstruction of the origins of Rome, Romulus and Remus
fight to death proving how the whole history of the city was generated by, and is bound to be
always connected to violence. Such a view was largely criticized by many reviewers who
found it demeaning the numerous complexities of Shakespeares play; Michael Billington on
The Guardian, for instance, regrets how much of the energy has gone into the impressive
physical staging, rather than into an analysis of a complex, subversive play20 while Carol
Chillington Rutter remarks in 2010 Shakespeare Survey how, ironically, [i]n Baileys
over-produced staging, Shakespeares rhetorical play was forgotten21.

The crowd in this gory production is rendered through the use of the background
projections. While some find the expedient refreshing (Billington remarking: For once, Rome
doesn't seem drastically underpopulated22), the majority of the reviewers argues that the
video, rather than enhancing the experience, tend to be a bit distracting after a while23 or,
worse, to alienate the audience from the players.
Difficulties are especially clear in the Forum scene, during which a few extras interact
onstage with Brutus and Antony while hundreds of computerized cast member replicas fret
in the background; the co-existence of flesh-and-blood actors and their virtual duplicates is a
distinguishing feature of the production, yet not a generally praised one. Hartley, for

19
Ibidem.
20
Michael Billington, Julius Caesar, The Guardian, 27 May 2009.
21
Carol Chillington Rutter, Shakespeare performances in England 2009, Shakespeare Survey, 63:1
(2010), pp. 368.
22
Billington, 2009.
23
Neil Norman, Bailey's stab at Caesar is a bloody thrill, Daily Express, 29 May 2009.
instance, regrets how "[t]his pretty embarrassing device gave the speakers nothing to work
with, all sense of movement in the crowd being supplied by the gratuitous underscoring of
musicians"24 while Spencer in The Telegraph notices how the interaction between film and
live performers doesn't always work25.
In addition to this juxtaposition of real and virtual in scenes involving active
participation from the crowd (1.1; 1.2; 3.2; 3.3), the people of Rome walk about, run, shout
and rejoice in the background during scene changes and scenes which do not normally
include their presence (1.3; 2.4); the digital mob is thus basically omnipresent, even in the
latter half of the play, when supers and computerized soldiers serve as members of the two
opposing armies.
To Hartley, the major problem with Baileys staging is that it "failed to catch the most
crucial of temporal categories in theatre, the compelling now of the performative moment"26.
Such a remark might explain the odd feeling most of the reviewers record about the device
and the production in general; despite its undeniable aesthetic merits, in fact, the video
projection seems to add little to Baileys personal understanding of the play in terms of
content and eventually becomes a nuisance to the natural flowing of the ensembles acting.

2012: Gregory Doran at the Royal Shakespeare Theatre.

2012 was indubitably a busy year for Shakespearean practitioners throughout the UK
and the world; in order to celebrate the Cultural Olympiad (as part of the 2012 London
Olympic Games), the RSC produced the World Shakespeare Festival, a feast bringing
together theatre companies from all over the globe to celebrate the UK most famous
playwright. Gregory Dorans Julius Caesar is a production designed to fit in the Festival
international approach; thus, Caesars Rome is famously moved to an undefined African
country and the cast entirely made of black actors and actresses playing in their own African
accents.
Reviewers almost unanimously praise Dorans endeavor. Despite Susannah Clapp's
remark that this is not a relocation that tries to startle its audience with modern parallels27,
the production indeed feels relevant, the translation to modern-day Africa a startlingly close
fit28 that lends the play a fresh urgency29.

24
Hartley, p. 237.
25
Charles Spencer, An empire bathed in blood, The Daily Telegraph, 28 May 2009.
26
Hartley, p. 238. (Original emphasis.)
27
Susannah Clapp, When not in Rome...: Setting Julius Caesar in war-torn Africa proves a
revelation, The Observer, 10 June 2012.
28
Kate Bassett, From Ancient Rome to Africa, dictators fall, The Independent, 10 June 2012.
29
Michael Billington, A Caesar to be praised, not buried, The Guardian, 07 June 2012.
 Ian Shuttleworth (Financial Times, 08 June 2012) and Rutter (Shakespeare Survey,
2013), however, show some concerns about the unintentional surfacing of racist issues in
the production approach.

In fact while celebrating Shakespeare's universality, herein lies a danger that this kind of
interpretation may inadvertently point up the contrast between host and subject cultures.
Especially at a time of heritage-centred celebration like this, it may evoke complacent (not to
say racist) self-congratulation that we ourselves are not prone to such African-style instability
and conflict.30

Rutter eventually concludes that, although she still hasnt reached a satisfactory answer to
the dilemma, she hopes Dorans production will eventually reveal itself as important
pro-activism by the RSC en route to actual, as against token, colour-blind casting31.

The crowd in Dorans production is finely staged. A group of celebrating extras opens
the show, the Soothsayer sharing the stage with them, dancing and singing whilst the public
is still filling the auditorium. The references to an African setting are immediately visible, from
the mob costumes to the music and the Soothsayers shaman-like look; the people chant
Caesars name to a rhythmic tune, while flags, fliers and a bronze statue sporting Caesars
image add up to give the audience the disturbing impression of having somehow entered a
dictatorship country.
During the Forum scene, the multitude actively takes part in what feels more like a
conversation than the one-sided lecture of other productions, especially when Marc Antony
is onstage. Dorans crowd looks and feels natural even in its contradictions: the throng
interrupts both speakers with loud praises and blames; falls into confused silence only to
burst out again in even more aggressive shouts and finally leaves the stage inflamed by
Antonys words and chant honouring Caesar's name.
The theatre audience then sees Cinna enter the darkened stage alone, in a spotlight.
The poet is soon surrounded by an aggressive multitude who insistently demands him to
disclose his identity, half-jokingly blinding him with torches. When Cinna finally reveals his
name, the crowd closes around him and block him in a tyre, at which point the poet manages
to escape from the stage. The audience is however left with the clear and startling
impression that the mob, had they had the chance, would have surely set the unfortunate
stranger on fire.

30
Ian Shuttleworth, Julius Caesar, Financial Times, 08 June 2012.
31
Carol Chillington Rutter, Shakespeare Performances in England (and Wales) 2012, Shakespeare
Survey, 66:1 (2013), p. 390.
 The same production was adapted in a film version for the BBC; the stage version
and the film differ only for the setting, the latter boasting a variety of sets enriching the
audiences experience: from the secluded hallway in which Cassius first approaches Brutus
to the abandoned escalator on which Caesar finds his death and the worn out building
through which the battle enrage. It is interesting to note, however, how the RST stage is
maintained even in the film version during all of the major crowd scenes32, except for the
Cinna the Poet one, which was reshot in what looks like an African village street.
The Cinna the Poet scene deserves particular attention, it being the only crowd
scene which was restaged for the film. The scene unfolding on screen is almost identical to
the one performed at the RST but for Dorans decision to alternate the regular camera with
what seems a mobile phone one in the film. The clever device throws the audience in the
middle of the scene, eerily suggesting the presence of someone on the other side of the
screen unwincingly shooting the burning to death of an innocent without showing any
intention of stopping it. So, if the scene dynamics are basically the same, the mobile phone
shot device makes it incredibly more disturbing in the film version, hitting closer to home an
audience, the British one, who only the previous summer had experienced in some of its
major cities riots and arson cold-bloodedly recorded by mobile phone camera lenses.

2012: Phyllida Lloyd at the Donmar Warehouse.

Beginning its run in late November 2012, Phyllida Lloyd's all-female production at the
Donmar Warehouse closely follows Dorans successful take at the play. Contrary to Dorans
Caesar, however, Lloyds is one of those shows immediately bound to excite strong
passions: either you hate it or you love it, no in-between reaction recorded by reviewers.
The production was met by media dispute on female participation in the UK theatre
community, an issue famously close to the directors heart. Many detractors of the show
(Tim Walker, Seven Magazine, 09/12/2012; Charles Spencer, The Daily Telegraph,
05/12/2012) based their discontent on Lloyds dismissal of traditional gender-based casting,
only reluctantly admitting the indisputable worth of the all-female ensemble performances.
Such criticism, attacking the directors personal stance rather than the production itself, is to
be dismissed as simply pointlessly outdated.

32
A possible and fairly straight-forward reason for this staging choice might be found in logistic
difficulties to manage a crowd of extras in outdoors shootings and in more concrete financial budget
reasons as well. Yet, it is interesting to speculate why this very specific scenes have been denied the
filmic treatment. Such a choice seems to suggest that, if most of the play can be understood and
treated as an intimate political struggle of individuals that somehow deserves to be rehearsed in
smaller, more intimate spaces, the crowd scenes are on the other hand theatrical scenes, as if the
individuals suddenly (and forcedly) turned into actors in front of an audience.
 Through the use of a clever metatheatrical device, Lloyds production sees the play
of Caesar being rehearsed onstage by a group of prison inmates. The Donmar audience is
not completely aware of the metatheatrical nature of the show they are watching until very
late into the performance (specifically in the midst of the Cinna the Poet scene) even though
a few directorial choices hint at it from the very beginning. Lloyd cuts the Shakespearean
opening scene featuring Marullus, Flavius and the populace and opens her production with a
restaged Lupercal scene; a group of convicts enter the stage closely watched by prison
guards who lock them up in the room and switch the lights off. From this moment onwards,
the stage will always be in semi or complete darkness, the players visible in spotlights; a few
times during the show, however, the metatheatrical illusion is broken by wardens, these
intrusions (namely, during the Cinna the Poet scene and at the end) signalled by a sudden
return to full lights on.
The renewed Lupercal scene focuses on the inmates reaction to Caesars entrance,
the convicts cheering on her noisily, singing along to Antonys serenade for her and dancing
martially after Caesars instruction, all wearing masks of the dictators face to a disturbing
effect. In his review on The Telegraph Charles Moore briefly complains about the absence of
the opening scene, arguing that the cut influences the efficacy of the Forum scene and the
power of its rhetoric. For this to work on stage, he states there has to be a strong sense of
the mob, yet Lloyd cuts the opening crowd scene. The backdrop is thrown away.33 Moores
argument is debatable. It is undeniably true that the members of the populace are given a
voice by Shakespeare in the opening scene that enriches and complicates the perception of
the mob in general; however, Lloyds choice of cutting the scene and reimagining the
Lupercal race offers the audience an equally strong sense of the crowd, even if of a different
kind than the one presented by Shakespeare. Lloyds throng is clearly and easily influenced
from the very beginning by Caesars powerful presence (and thus easily prone to yield to
powerful figures). This is a conscious choice that doesnt diminish the power of the following
Forum scene, making full sense with the directorial approach to the production.
The staging of the two marketplace orations is visually impressive. When Brutus
finally offers her own life for Rome, thus concluding her speech to a crowd who up to that
point has paid little attention to her proclaiming figure standing on a worn-out chair, the mob
starts to close around the orator, loudly urging her to live, speaking over her words and
obsessively trying to touch her. It is a graphically powerful image, the throng surrounding
Brutus almost as if they wanted to swallow her, an apt metaphor of the honourable womans

33
Charles Moore, I fear this director comes to bury Caesar, The Telegraph, 9 December 2012.
failure to control the populace, a downward movement to nothingness. Marc Antonys
following speech, on the contrary, starts with Caesars favourite lying on the ground, a circle
of gunned people enclosing her; clearly the people dont trust her and yet, her words
manage to upturn their judgement and Antonys speech too becomes a visual experience,
her hand gestures commanding the crowds voices just like her words control the multitudes
feelings; it may look a bit pretentious but it is indeed beautifully done, Antony literally raising
from the ground to a new leader status.
The Cinna the Poet scene is a turning point in the production, the first time when the
metatheatrical device is openly disclosed. The scene between a bewildered poet and the
menacing throng is suddenly stopped by a warden, lights going fully up as the convict
playing Cinna has to leave; the other inmates seem sad to see their friend go but they
quickly replace her as the lights go down and the play starts again. The violence against the
Second Cinna escalates quickly to a proper fight beyond control and thus the scene has to
be stopped again, Caesar gaining center stage to make sure that the woman playing Cinna
is all right and, that assured, signalling the wardens to let the play enroll again. From this
point onwards, the audience is fully aware of the metatheatrical device, the production
furthermore hinting for the first time to a possible connection between Caesar and some kind
of external authority. This link becomes disturbingly clear in the closing moments of the
show, when the inmates rehearsals are abruptly interrupted by the intercom upcoming
lock-up notice; the illusion is broken for good and the inmates file out of the room door with
the guards, among which features Frances Baker who had previously shared the stage with
the other members of the cast as Caesar. This final revelation changes the whole meaning
of the production, as Rutter underlines in 2013 Shakespeare Survey:

Everything wed seen was radically reframed, play discovered as displacement activity and
perverse therapy, a regime keeping control and getting its kicks not just by permitting but
playing with (and in) the playing out of inmates fantasy, the ritual killing of hated authority.34

The slightly hinted reference to the previous year riots in Dorans filmic Caesar gets a more
complex treatment in Lloyds profound rethinking of the plays meaning. Polemics following
the 2011 London riots ascribed the disorders to young violent people distrusting any kind of
authority; yet, Lloyds production seem to suggest that these unruly youngsters might have
been somehow prompted to violence by that same authorial figures they were challenging.

2014: Dominic Dromgoole at the Shakespeares Globe.

34
Carol Chillington Rutter, Shakespeare Performances in England 2013, Shakespeare Survey, 67:1
(2013), pp. 427-428.
 The latest British Julius Caesar opened at the Shakespeares Globe last summer
under Dominic Dromgooles direction; as it often is with Globe productions, Dromgooles
take at the play is an Elizabethan-costumes no-cuts kind of staging, the playhouse striving
to offer its audience the same kind of experience Shakespeare's contemporaries might have
had. Back in 1999, when the Shakespeares Globe opened its third season with a Julius
Caesar production just like the original Globe Theatre had done 400 years earlier, Michael
Billington harshly commented on the companys obsession with the past and hoped for it to
eventually find its own present dimension rather than being content to go on churning out
inexpressibly dreary productions [...] to restless, inattentive, largely tourist audiences35.
When reviewing last years production, Billington makes no mention to his previous
argument, stating that [i]t's a production, sensibly played in Elizabethan costume with
Roman accessories, that delivers the play with great clarity and makes good use of the
space36; whether the reviewer has finally given up on the Globe for good or the production
was just generally good but not tremendously exciting is not clear.

In terms of crowd staging, however, a production for the Shakespeares Globe is

potentially unique; when taking full advantage of the specificities of the playhouse structure,
in fact, Globe actors can engage in an uncommonly intimate relationship with the audience
rarely to be experienced in modern theatres. In Dromgooles production, for instance,
members of the company are to be found interacting with the public even before the actual
beginning of the show, noisily and merrily celebrating the Lupercalia both in the theatre foyer
and the pit; as Sarah Hemmings notes on the Financial Times, [b]y the time the play starts,
the mood is set: this is a volatile city on the brink, the people a potent mass to be whipped
up, damped down and cannily handled.37
The Forum scene handling of the crowd becomes at the Globe the handling of the
whole playhouse as the two orators speeches are addressed directly to the audience as if
we were the Roman citizens who hold the future of the empire in our hands.38 The populace
of Rome is scattered throughout the pit and shouts, jumps, cheers and cries in response to
Brutuss and Antonys words, inviting the audience to feel the same.
The peoples presence is always felt in the playhouse. Even when the multitude is
not required by the text, little groups of Romans walk about the stage during scene changes,
granting the production a lifelike atmosphere. The Cinna the Poet scene begins just like that,

35
Michael Billington, The Guardian, 02 June 1999 as quoted in Hartley, 2014, p. 222.
36
Michael Billington, Globe's Roman ruffians overthrow a suave and silvery Caesar, The Guardian,
04 July 2014.
37
Sarah Hemmings, Julius Caesar, Financial Times, 04 July 2014.
38
Charles Spencer, Julius Caesar, The Telegraph, 04 July 2014.
a trail of the previous Forum scene, when the multitude still cheering Caesars name enters
the stage to find the poet alone, hidden behind a pillar. What starts as a joking questioning
about the mans circumstances, soon becomes a scene of violence and terror which directly
affects the whole audience at large.

All in all, despite the lack of an innovative directorial style behind the production,
Dromgooles Caesar succeeds in offering its public good entertainment and in engaging with
it; and if Billingtons wish for a more visible interpretation of the play39 on the directors part
is definitely more desirable, a well-performed and staged show, if only a bit flat, is
nonetheless commendable.

Conclusions:
This present study aimed at tracing a brief performance history of last decade UK
productions of Shakespeares Julius Caesar, focusing especially on the depiction of the
crowd onstage to use it as a lens through which to describe major shifts in contemporary UK
society cultural concerns.
Deborah Warners Julius Caesar used the gigantic multitude crammed onstage as a
gauge of modern attitudes towards power and social incertitude; her mob is first shown in
lovingly, noisy adoration for its leader and then, once the chief man is gone, more than
willing to grant its own decision power to someone else, if only to avoid the terrifying
prospect of uncertainty.
Sean Holmess approach to the play goes in an almost opposite direction; the
populace of Rome is present onstage and yet always hidden in the darkened wings, not
allowed a proper place in the spotlight, quite literally. Not to give the people a role in Caesar
equals to diminishing complexities of the play, reducing it to a story of powerful men
withdrawn from reality.
The Tragedy of Caesar as devised by Lucy Bailey makes instead a consistent use of
the crowd, even if it is a digital one. The device downgrades the multitude to a mere
aesthetic component in a extra-violent world in which politics can only figure subordinate to
bloodthirst. The desire to impress the theatre audience might have played against the
director, who seems to have somewhat misinterpreted some of the plays main features.
2012 Caesars felt like the more politically engaged ones. Gregory Dorans relocation
of the play to modern Africa made Shakespeares text freshly relevant, while his veiled
allusions to the previous year UK riots in the Cinna the Poet scene (both onstage and in the

39
Billington, 1999 as quoted in Hartley, 2014, p. 223.
BBC film version) are bound to have hit a chord in the RSC audience; the seemingly joyful
and easy-going crowd of the beginning of the show suddenly turns into a violent mob in the
Cinna the Poet scene, unmoved by arson and disorders just like the London and
Birmingham youth had done only a year earlier.
Also Phyllida Lloyds all-female production referred back to the 2011 riots, tackling
the matter from a different point of view; Lloyds metatheatrical Julius Caesar, in fact, seems
to ask its audience to ponder upon who is to really held responsible for the uproaring mob in
a world where authority figures seem to care less and less about their own people, possibly
(and disturbingly) even playing with their lives and futures.
Lastly, Dominic Dromgooles take at the play makes the most of the Shakespeares
Globe structure, offering its audience an engaging leap into the past. The production seems
to have little to say about its contemporaries but it is a good example of an attitude still
soundly present in the UK Shakespearean community, approaching the playwrights text
more academically than in a modern theatrical framework.

Thus, the latest Julius Caesar stagings in the UK still follow a pattern started by the
opening of Welless Caesar at Mercury theatre, i.e. the most innovative productions in
political and social terms always seem to have to be balanced by a more traditional
approach (especially by the Globe and sometimes the RSC). Fortunately, Hartleys
remarkable performance history study shows a development towards a more complex
reading of the play but it is also true that Shakespeares work still sometimes equates to an
exercise in rhetoric and history for some.
In a world in which mass participation to major events and the media manipulation of
peoples worries are ever more inevitable, a production willingly ignoring the role of the
crowd or its political potential is bound to fail. As Hartley rightfully concludes, in fact,

the productions which have generally been the best received have married a sense of political
urgency with a specificity of characterisation and a clear and dynamic engagement with the
crowd. Ignoring any one of these elements imperils a production, and the best seem to
grapple with all three constructively.40

Hopefully this brief essay as proven Hartley right.

40
Hartley, 2014, p. 240.
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