There’s a power struggle going on at The Bridge Theatre.
Certainly, between the characters in Julius Caesar, Shakespeare’s politically-charged tragedy – but also, between the lead actors in the play. Ben Whishaw, Michelle Fairley and David Calder all give quite different but equally outstanding and resonant performances in this jaunty adaptation.
We’re in the present day (spoiler: Caesar is shot with a gun), although the great Bard’s complex language looms, sometimes a touch too densely.
Set designer Bunny Christie has helped develop an intimate show which allows audiences intimate access to the actors. Audiences with promenade tickets stand within a metre of the action, and are pushed from one place to another, to form the jeering crowds and protestors, as the play (and the stage props) move from one scene to the next, performed in-the-round.
Bunny and director Nick Hytner create two distinct styles of show. In the brooding earlier scenes, as plotters plan to kill Caesar, it’s stripped-back. Shards of white light and simple props stylistically convey the sheer emotional terror of planning a killing. It is fun, if 10 minutes too long, because the latter half is what everyone’s here for. As unrest rips apart lives and loyalties, Bunny’s sets soar. They are burning fires, wired trenches, authentic-looking battlefields, seemingly pulled together out of nowhere which create worlds of terror on stage. A standing ticket is simply a must.
As for the performances, Ben Whishaw channels his role as Q in the James Bond films as the nerdy but intellectual Brutus, who is both fractured and fracturing. Whishaw is an expert at playing self doubt, and is both excruciatingly awkward and thrillingly assured at different points.
Michelle Fairley, Catelyn Stark in Game of Thrones, is Cassius. The rash, impassioned soldier and conspirator. A libertarian, she bands about famous Bard quotes (‘the answer is not in the stars, it’s with us’) as she drills hard-line political spiel into Brutus to convince him to help her overthrow Julius Caesar, the popular leader who has honest thought and common good, but should be overthrown (there’s echoes of Trump here).
David Morrissey is rapturous but left on the side-lines as Mark Antony, a passionate supporter of Caesar’s – but he gets the play’s juiciest lines. Calder has played an award-winning Lear and is no less commanding here. He dutifully paints Caesar as a good man but a man out-of-touch.
The turbo-charged star performances are well worth the ticket price, but set designer Bunny Christie is the star that shines brightest, for staging a show that thoroughly modernises the Bard, in terms of both style and substance.
