By H. R. Coursen

Julius Caesar is always seeking contemporary relevance. In 1937, as fascism threatened Europe, Orson Welles and the Mercury Theater produced a version in which Welles vastly oversimplified the issues by making Caesar a fascist. Antony’s oration played out against long red banners and klieg lights. Whatever he is, Caesar is the person in charge. Remove him, and anarchy must result. A few slogans that anticipate the sentiments of John Locke’s “Second Treatise on Civil Government” are no substitute for a power vacuum. The neoconservatives who conned us into the invasion of Iraq had forgotten their 10th grade reading. John Houseman tells us that during one performance of the Welles’s production, a Western Union messenger boy wandered across the stage during the storm scene, seeking Welles. Having left the telegram in Orson’s dressing room, the messenger was later observed in the crowd scenes. Modern dress versions do have their advantages, but their messages seldom deliver the complexity of the Shakespearean script.

The toga-clad Mankiewicz film of 1953 sought parallels with Mussolini; but, for its audience, it was all about McCarthyism. Since Louis Calhern was Caesar in the production, it was filled with busts of Calhern. I wonder whether he snared any for his mantelpiece. The film betrays its plastic premises by making Philippi an ambush at Drygulch-Antony and his wild Indians lurking in the hills as Brutus marches confidently into a trap. The film is worth watching for Gielgud’s assertive Cassius as he overpowers James Mason’s Brutus, and for Brando’s powerful combination of passion and cynicism in his oration.

The recent version at Portland Stage Company in Portland, Maine, attempted to draw energy from our 2008 election. The characters wore suits and skirts, communicated via cell phone, and, if Caesar, had Secret Service types prowling the edges of events. One of them betrayed Caesar by failing to intervene in the assassination. A giant TV screen above the marble playing space gave us images of storm and mob. This production looked very much like David Thacker’s 1993 production for the Royal Shakespeare Company at The Other Place in Stratford-gurney for Caesar’s body, bemedalled aristocrats, and other contemporary trappings.

Julius Caesar has its anachronisms-doublets and striking clocks in Rome. And some scripts will work in generalized modern contexts: Richard II and Much Ado about Nothing, for example. But productions often collide with modern weaponry. Luhrmann’s Romeo and Juliet had to rename its pistols “Swords.” Almereyda’s contemporary Hamlet reintroduced in Laertes’ hand the gun that had killed Polonius. How had it gotten from the NYPD evidence locker to the final “duel”? Loncraine’s late-30s Richard III (Ian McKellen) forgot to include an air force within his modern army (Hitler did not) and thus lost at Bosworth Field. His rival Stanley had the only B-25 extant.

In the Portland Stage production, Octavius (a woman) fought the battle of Philippi in a skirt and brandished a .45 in her hand, calling it a sword. Such women are dangerous. No need here for anyone to hold a sword for another to run upon when pistols were so prevalent. While machine gun fire punctuated the background of Philippi, we heard no aircraft. I wondered how and where Marc Antony had won his Purple Heart and whether the National Defense Service Medal was really Cassius’s highest decoration. A detailed “modern” treatment, unfortunately, invites such questions. The effect is a schizophrenic contest between what we see and what we hear.

Gender issues were a more basic issue here, however. Shakespeare’s histories tend to show women as victims of male politicians-Margaret of Henry VI, Lady Macbeth, and Cleopatra being exceptions. While Elizabeth was Queen in the 1590s, the women in the history plays are marginalized and complain, as does Hotspur’s wife, Kate, or curse, as does Richard III’s mother, the Duchess of York. The women in Julius Caesar are victims. But here, Cassius, driver of the conspiracy is a woman. Rebecca Watson’s biting and dynamic Cassius would not, as a woman, be jealous of Caesar, as he says she is. And she must say “we petty men,” even when the script is otherwise edited toward her gender. That Octavius-Rome’s first emperor-becomes a woman (Sally Wood) is even more ludicrous. To tamper thus with the script for the purpose of bringing us a Golda Meier or a Margaret Thatcher is to tamper with history. It is impossible to believe that the Octavius of Antony and Cleopatra could be depicted as a woman.

The two great parallel scenes with the women and their men were all wrong, perhaps because of the basic changes made in the roles of Cassius and Octavius. In other words, with gender issues so confused in the assigning of parts, the areas were gender is considered were incoherent. The Portland Stage lists Mary Hamer’s article on Portia and Calpurnia, but the production did not suggest that anyone had read it. Natalie Rose Liberace’s fetching Calpurnia seemed to be saying, subtextually, to Caesar, you are being a fool. What she should be saying is, I am sorry that you are being a fool. The latter sense conveys love, not scarcely-concealed contempt. Sally Wood’s Portia shrieked at Brutus. No. Portia creates an understated zone of love for him to enter. This Portia’s shrillness would have driven even the most confirmed of stoics away from her.

Thus one of the profound issues that this script raises-the depth of the woman’s understanding vs. the superficiality of the men’s posturing and rationalizing-was lost here.

This production edited out the “second revelation” of Portia’s death. It permits Brutus to pose as philosopher and thus win Messala’s support for the decision to confront Antony and Octavius at Philippi. The BBC-TV version showed how effective that interpretation can be. Messala, still dumb-founded by Brutus’s apparent acceptance of Portia’s death, nodded when Brutus overruled Cassius.

The high points of this production were the assassination and the oration sequence. The former was violent and vividly choreographed. Caesar defended himself (as Plutarch suggests he did), in this instance by wresting Casca’s dagger from him and lashing back at his circling murderers. The moment validated the courage that Kevin Kelly’s suave Caesar attributed to himself. The speeches came at us via microphone. Don Domingues’s Brutus had not conveyed any “interiority” up to his point. As muddled as Brutus is, he attempts to think. Domingues was “acting” all the time, paying more attention to hitting consonants than working on the rhythms that would make the lines mean something. But his straightforward oration set Antony’s demagoguery-his motion, his specificity, his use of props, his claim of plainness-up nicely. The effect would have been more potent had live voices responded from within the auditorium, as opposed to recordings. Years ago, the Theater at Monmouth infiltrated the audience with respondents who rushed up to view Caesar’s body. Then, all exited before the intermission, thereby reframing the action and pulling the emotion away, lest we rush out and put the ticket booth to the torch. Here, the intermission occurred after the assassination of Caesar. All that red vegetable dye had to be sponged up.

Obviously, the production used doubling. But what point did it make by doubling the parts of Portia and Octavius? The great Terry Hands production of Henry V in the mid- 1970s doubled traitors with soldiers, thereby raising the question of treason and loyalty. What issues did the technique illuminate here? Director Lucy Smith Conroy said in her interview, included in the opulent booklet that Portland Stage produced, “I’m understanding Cassius in a totally different way in this production than I ever did just reading the play.”
Of course. The script provides speeches-an outline that an actor completes with voice, body, subtext, and interaction with the energy field created by the other actors and the audience. Rebecca Watson’s Cassius might have worked had she played the role as a man, a la Garbo in Queen Christina or Goldberg in The Associate. But that would have required a more traditional design, either Elizabethan or “Roman.” To understand Cassius as a woman is to understand something that is not there. He is cut off even from his feminine psyche, or anima, and blames his temper on his mother.

The links between the assassination of Caesar and our own election are murky at best. The death of Caesar brought civil war and then empire. Augustus reigned for decades. Our own imperial assumptions are being challenged at this moment, and whoever wins the presidency had better follow George Bush’s advice in 2000-that is, to conduct foreign policy “with humility.” We now have no choice.

It was Caesar who stood in for Strato and held Brutus’s sword. Thus the production fulfilled Plutarch’s suggestion about Caesar’s immortality. The gods, Plutarch tells us, were upset with the assassination of Caesar.

In spite of that nice final choice, this production put us in a modern world where the gods have little to do with anything. Thus it lost much of the play’s spectacle and its emphasis on the unseen forces working through the politics of mere mortals. Those are some of the values that we seek in Shakespeare. The play is haunted-not just by Caesar’s ghost, but by storms that reflect cosmic outrage, omens uncovered in the entrails of birds, and portents that persuade even Cassius to abandon his epicurean premises. This production gave us what so much modern media provide-savagery with no meaning beyond domestic fury and fierce civil strife. That we have in abundance in the world beyond the stage. Director Conroy says of this production “It is the type of thing you might see in a movie house.” Yes, but we go to theater for something that movies do not provide. When we go to a live performance, we are in a space where the action is occurring. As soon as theater becomes film, we are better off with that version of reality. Film does itself better than theater can. But film can never do what theater can when the latter medium is free to display its magic to that breathing audience out there.

For all of my objections, the production was clearly spoken-except for the Flavius, Marullus, Cobbler opening. And the comments of the elderly audience as it left the auditorium were uniformly positive.