Let's drop the fascist Caesar and give the middle classes a real challenge
FRANK JOHNSON
The Royal Shakespeare Company's latest Julius Caesar, just arrived at the Barbican from Stratford, has Caesar as a fascistic dictator. Here we go again.
For decades that has been the only Caesar on offer from either of our national, subsidised companies. The incidence of fascist Caesars has increased the further we have travelled in time from the fascist era. When, as adolescents, we of my generation became acquainted with the plays from the Old Vic gallery. Caesar tended to be set in ancient Rome. The Caesar who, for some of us, was the role's last great interpreter — the late Brewster Mason — wore a toga, and played him as a benign ruler, at worst an enlightened despot.
We cannot tell whether that was what Shakespeare thought of him. But Shakespeare would have been much exposed to the Roman Catholic Church's opinion. There, Caesar was history's greatest source of good among secular rulers; precursor of the Roman empire which spread Latin civilisation and order. Much of the Church's imagery, including that of the papacy itself, was inspired by the Roman imperialism that Caesar was assumed to have tried to create before his assassination, and the opposition to which was the assassination's reason, or excuse. For this reason. Dante sends the assassins deep into Hell. Perhaps Shakespeare did not think of Caesar in that way. But it is one interpretation of him from the text.
The fascist Caesar narrows the audience's choice. It is also too safe; not at all 'disturbing' or 'challenging', two words much used by theatre directors. Shakespeare performances are attended mainly by the white, educated middle classes. With their 'outreach programmes, the subsidised companies are expected by the Arts Council to make it otherwise. But white, educated and middle class is the reality. That class is not disturbed or challenged by the suggestion that fascism is bad. None of them thinks otherwise. The Old Vic put on a fascist-inspired Hamlet in the 1930s. There was just a possibility then that some in the audience might have been Mosleyites. Not now.
The fascist Caesar, then, is an old cliché. As Sam Goldvqn presumably said, we need some new clichés. With the tragedies this is easier said than done. The RSC and the Royal National are so original in the comedies and the romances, but they have trou ble with the tragedies. especially Caesar. But this is precisely because of the politics which still sees fascism as the thing to guard against above all. Nearly all directors and arts administrators are leftish or liberal, unlike most people professionally engaged in politics such as Mr Blair and Mr Blunkett. They think that the way to challenge the middle classes is to praise Mr Mandela and denounce the late Enoch Powell, whereas only the opposite would challenge them. They do not realise that Mr Benn now draws large, appreciative middle-class audiences when he appears in the shires to reminisce about his long career.
The Conservative party is now unpopular among the middle classes not because it is thought insufficiently right-wing, but because it is thought too right-wing. This is the first time in our history that that has been the case.
If directors really wanted to challenge or disturb their audiences. how would Caesar be depicted? It would be difficult. Ile could be shown as a politically correct directorgeneral or editor-in-chief who is about to suppress anything which suggests that multiculturalism is often violent and squalid. That is why the assassins decided to overthrow him. They are the champions of the put-upon traditional middle class. That would disturb a Barbican audience all right.
But it is best not to force the play into anything. Text and action admit of many interpretations. Are the assassins' motives especially pure? Is Caesar really a tyrant?
Once Brutus is safely dead. Antony says that he was the only conspirator whose motives were honourable. That seems to be true. But Shakespeare suggests that honourable motives are not enough for so drastic a deed as assassination. He has Brutus as confused and illogical. It must be by his death,' Brutus says. But in the next breath he admits, 'I know no personal cause to spurn at him.' A few lines later he admits more, `. . . to speak truth of Caesar, I have not known when his affections swayed more than his reason'. So Caesar has done nothing wrong or tyrannical yet.
Those remarks upset Coleridge who wrote of that speech:
This is singular — at least I do not at present see into Shakespeare's motive, the rationale — or in what point he meant Brutus' character to appear.... How too could Brutus say he finds no personal cause; i.e. none in Caesar's past conduct as a man? Had he not passed the Rubicon? Entered Rome as a conqueror? Placed his Gauls in the senate? Shakespeare, it may be said, has not brought these things forward. True! And this is just the ground for my perplexity. What character does Shakespeare mean his Brutus to be?
Perhaps Shakespeare offered no answer to that question, and left it to the audience. Coleridge was more shocked by the crossing of the Rubicon, the entering of Rome as conqueror, etc. than he thought Brutus was. But Coleridge, when he wrote those words, was probably still a doctrinaire liberal or radical. He thought that political belief explained political action. But Shakespeare may have thought that political action is better explained by the political actor's character. The cynical Cassius wins Brutus to the conspiracy by playing on Brutus' doctrinaire attitude to republicanism; an attitude that may have been the product of too abstract and impractical a character. Cassius convinces him and then Brutus convinces himself that Caesar will become a tyrannical king. Brutus kills Caesar for what he claims Caesar will become, not, by his own admission, for what he has been. He is entirely different from, say, Stauffenberg, the would-be assassin of Hitler.
Brutus' advice is always bad. His first decision, after the assassination, seals the assassins' fate: against Cassius' advice, he allows Antony to address the mob. and Antony turns it against the new regime. At the end of the play he recommends the wrong tactics for fighting the battle of Philippi.
John Palmer, a superb critic in the first half of the 20th century, wrote, 'Brutus has precisely the qualities which in every age have rendered the conscientious liberal ineffective in public life.' There is something for a director seeking to 'challenge' and 'disturb'.
Previous page
