The world-renowned Royal Shakespeare Company return to Blackpool Grand this week with Shakespeareโs fast-paced political thriller Julius Caesar. Director Atri Banerjee tells us more.
Celebrated director Atri Banerjeeโs excitingly fresh interpretation of Shakespeareโs timeless story forces us all to consider how far we would go for our political principles and exposes the ambiguity in trying to shift power. As we rage against the crises surrounding us, how far will we each go for our political principles?
The RSC production also features a Community Chorus (pictured) who will appear alongside the showโs professional acting company as part of the RSCโs continuing commitment to make theatre and Shakespeare accessible to everyone.
Emma Rucastle from local inclusive theatre group Tram Shed, Zoe Lamond from Blackpool Libraries, Beth Montgomery from Blackpool Tower, Tori Pollett a teacher at St Maryโs, youth worker Cy Karoonian and dance practitioner Hannah Dial will represent identities that have been marginalised, either at different points in history or in our world today.
The Chorus will be integrated into various musical elements of the production and appear as an otherworldly presence alongside a number of the characters, such as the Soothsayer, who famously warns Caesar to โbeware the Ides of Marchโ. They will also serve to heighten the playโs status as a tragedy as well as a visceral political thriller.
Q&A: Atri Banerjee
The show includes a community chorus. What role will they play?
Julius Caesar is a play about a nation in crisis, a play about the gulf between politicians and the people they are trying to rule. It just makes so much sense to me that this production, which is going on tour, would include โrealโ people from those areas. So alongside the professional acting company, we have found a way of integrating the communities from all the areas the show is playing.
Community work has always been important to me, making work with non-professionals, whether thatโs young people or non-professional adults. Itโs not unusual for productions of Julius Caesar to have a chorus who come on to be the citizens of Rome and say โRead The Willโ and then you never see them again. But I wanted to include them to amplify the supernatural, apocalyptic terror within the play. Theyโll be singing, using their voices, and will be present on stage for significant parts of the play. They will be something akin to the chorus youโd see in a Greek tragedy watching the action. Premonitions of death really. Premonitions of figures who embody death in ways that goes beyond these characters.
What appeals to you about directing this particular play?
I studied the play at uni, but it wasnโt one of the Shakespeare plays that I knew that well until I got round to applying for the role of director. We know itโs a political play, a play that speaks to our politics, speaks to who gets to be a leader, and asks us to think about what you do when you donโt agree with the people in power. Itโs often done in a way that reflects the age itโs being performed in. For example, the recent production in the Public Theatre in New York where Caesar was made to look like Donald Trump. And Shakespeare himself was writing the play at a time when Elizabeth I was coming to the end of her reign. There had been plots against her, and there was a question of who would succeed her. So even in Shakespeareโs day he was using this Roman story to talk about Elizabethan England and what happens when there is a possible power vacuum.
I wanted to make a production that felt like it could speak about today. I think we live in a world where a series of crises have happened, particularly over the last seven years, from Brexit, to Trump, the war in Ukraine, the pandemic, events that have revealed the massive rifts we have in our society between class, gender, race, disability, across every intersection of power. The questions I was asking myself were, When you feel like the world is in a bad place, what steps do you actually take to make the world a better? What are the limits of peaceful activism? How do we react, for example, to the likes of Extinction Rebellion, or the two young women who threw tomato soup at the Van Gogh painting?
Iโm also very aware that itโs easy to put Julius Caesar in a Donald Trump wig and cast him as the baddie, in a way thatโs quite black and white. But Iโm more interested in creating a production that makes an audience feel the conspirators were both totally right to kill Julius Caesar, and totally wrong to kill Julius Caesar at the same time. I wanted to capture that ambivalence thatโs central to what Shakespeare has written. Shakespeare isnโt offering any solutions. I donโt think he is saying one way is good and one way is wrong. Because the actions the conspirators take to assassinate Julius Caesar plunges Rome and the world into even more chaos. So what appealed to me about directing Julius Caesar is that it felt like a play that could think about these huge moral grey areas that we exist in without trying to draw any easy conclusions.
What can audiences expect from the production?
I hope they will come away from it asking the questions, What would I do? Would I go as far as to kill someone who is my best friend if I really thought that was going to make the world a better place? The answer is probably no to murder, thatโs the extremist version of it, but at what point do you glue yourself to Downing Street? At what point do you put yourself in front of a horse like the suffragettes did? We live through waves of political crisis, and activism tries to combat the crisis, but at what point do we resort to violence?
In terms of how the production looks, itโs not going to be a production thatโs set in Westminster, but neither will it be set in ancient Rome. It will draw on elements of the modern and the ancient world to create our own world really. Taking influences from impressionist theatre, from choreographers like Pina Bausch, and German theatre to make a world that feels quite stylised and heightened.
Iโm also very keen to convey a sense of the supernatural and time running out. The play has ghosts, omens and prophecies. The Soothsayer famously tells Caesar to beware the ideas of March. Characters are always worried about the time, and time running out. That relates to the climate crisis we face: if we donโt act now we will reach the unmanageable temperature for living. It feels to me that Caesar, like the world we live in today, is a play thatโs set in a place of emergency. The threat of apocalypse feels very close.
Tell us about the cast you have put together
I want to tell a story about power today. There are 48 named characters in the play, of which 46 are men and two of them are women. So weโve cast it in such a way to redress the gender imbalance in the play, so itโs about half and half men and women and one non-binary actor.
I have cast Brutus and Cassius as women. Yes, I do want the audience to think about their reactions to seeing two women in roles of power. But itโs not just about gender. Weโve got actors who are Black, weโve got actors who are South Asian, weโve got actors who are disabled, and one non-binary actor. The production will make people think about their reactions to power when it is held by people who arenโt part of the white male patriarchy that we have all been living in and all do still live in.
Can you tell us more about casting the roles of Brutus and Cassius as women?
The idea to cast Brutus as a woman was there from the beginning. The RSC has never had a female Brutus, and it felt like an opportunity to remodel this play here. For Cassius we auditioned both men and women, and we chose Kelly Gough to play that role in the end. It made sense to do so as part of a broader conversation and interrogation of gender in the play, given that Brutus and Cassius are the two main challengers to the prevailing power system in the play and especially given they operate very differently from one another, which broadens the conversation.
And in Thalissa Teixeira, we have Brutus being played by a Black woman, whilst Cassius is being played by a white woman. And thatโs providing another way of interrogating these power structures. Yes, theyโre both women, but their experiences are so different from each other based on their race in this case. Octavius Caesar is also being played by a Black woman, which adds yet another dimension to this conversation when we think about who takes over, who might be in the next generation.
Julius Caesar is at Blackpool Grand Theatre 16-20 May. Click here to book.
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