Review
CAESAR
The Shakespeare Company
Starring Heather Franklin
Written by William Shakespeare
Directed and re-imagined by Brad E. Simkulet
Runs until November 22
New Dance/Theatre
In its eight seasons, The Shakespeare Company (TSC) has provided us with some radical treatments of the Bard, from an S&M Measure For Measure to an all-female King Lear, but its latest show is its most extreme experiment to date.
Caesar is a one-woman version of Julius Caesar.
Since the company often casts women as men – perhaps to redress the inequity of Shakespeare’s time, when women weren’t allowed to act and boys played the distaff roles – I wasn’t surprised to learn that actor Heather Franklin would be portraying Marcus Brutus in this production. I did wonder, though, how TSC’s new artistic director, Brad Simkulet, was going to distil a play with more than 35 characters into a solo show.
Trying to imagine it, I thought Simkulet might have found a way of turning the play into a monologue, with Brutus justifying his decision to assassinate Caesar to save the Roman republic. I was ready for some kind of rewrite and curious as to how much of Shakespeare’s original text would remain.
Turns out I had it all wrong. The show consists entirely of Shakespeare’s text and it isn’t a monologue – although Franklin is the only actor onstage, there are 14 additional ones who provide recorded vocal performances of the other roles.
As reconceived by Simkulet, the play has become some kind of posthumous recurring nightmare, with the dead Brutus forced to rise and relive the assassination of Caesar, and his own subsequent fate, over and over again.
The play opens with Franklin’s noble Roman "awakening" from his suicide on the battlefield of Philippi and re-enacting the events that led to it, accompanied by the disembodied voices on the soundtrack. The intended effect, I believe, is the eerie one of a mad person interacting with unseen forms and speaking to the air.
Unfortunately, that’s not how it comes off. Franklin’s performance has none of the ardour and conviction of madness, and Simkulet, as director, hasn’t given her a strong physical vocabulary to define her character and help sculpt the imagined world in which she moves.
The staging is as bare-bones as it gets. Franklin wears nothing more than an undershirt and a pair of cotton pants. The sole prop is a chessboard, upon which she moves pieces to symbolize the gathering plot against Caesar. Mari Crozier’s simple lighting and the ambient noises in Simkulet and Russ Cann’s sound design are the only indicators of place and time of day. Yet, as a low-budget solution to producing Shakespeare, this approach might work if the recorded actors didn’t give such uneven and garbled performances and if the lone live one was more exciting.
The Shakespeare Company is calling this its "Brave New World" season. As it stands, Caesar is a brave performance experiment, but as an interpretation of Shakespeare’s tragedy, it doesn’t offer anything new. |
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