Julius Caesar, Donmar Warehouse - review

A bold and thuggish all-female cast drag Shakespeare's Roman classic into a modern day women's prison
1/3
11 January 2013

Phyllida Lloyd’s all-female Julius Caesar is extraordinarily bold. It’s not just the casting that makes it feel daring; there’s also a crazed, percussive intensity, and the production abounds with weirdness, thuggery and horror.

Set in a women’s prison, it seems far removed from the original Roman location. The constrained environment prompts thoughts about restrictive gender roles. But I wouldn’t call it a straightforwardly feminist reading; it’s something weirder and wilder than that. Most of the action takes the form of a play within a play: the inmates are staging Shakespeare’s aggressively political drama, and their power struggles emerge in a great surge of riotous physicality.

The aesthetic is all rather Prisoner Cell Block H, with a twist of Stasi brutality. The theatre’s usual seating has been stripped out, replaced by functional plastic chairs. Bunny Christie’s set is hard, grey and grimy.

CCTV cameras suggest the hum of activity offstage. Occasionally some of the performers launch into thrashy rock music, which echoes ominously.

At the same time there’s grim humour: doughnuts being used as instruments of torture, the haunting soothsayer deriving her predictions from a copy of Heat magazine.

The action moves swiftly. It’s most arresting in the famous assassination scene, which here involves Caesar being choked with bleach. Much of the audience will find the details tricky to see – and that’s deliberate. As so often with eruptions of violence, we wonder what it is we’ve just witnessed, and there are plenty more moments of nagging ambiguity.

Frances Barber is a viciously bullying Caesar, an arbitrary tyrant who in her beret and leather trenchcoat looks like someone you might find in a spy film loitering seedily in a railway arch. Harriet Walter’s austere Brutus is a performance of riveting intricacy. Cush Jumbo’s Mark Antony is impassioned, yet she also at times has an unusual brooding stillness. Jenny Jules brings a raw derangement to Cassius. There are ex-offenders in the cast, too, graduates of the excellent company Clean Break.

This strikes me as an important production. Lloyd pushes her vision very hard, perhaps to the detriment of its logic. The elaborate framing device of the play-within-a-play doesn’t quite work. But even it it’s not a Julius Caesar for purists, this is visceral and exciting theatre.

Until February 9. Tel: 0844 871 7624 or go to donmarwarehouse.com

If you miss out on the Barclays Front Row £10 ticket scheme on Monday then please try again on the following Monday.

Create a FREE account to continue reading

eros

Registration is a free and easy way to support our journalism.

Join our community where you can: comment on stories; sign up to newsletters; enter competitions and access content on our app.

Your email address

Must be at least 6 characters, include an upper and lower case character and a number

You must be at least 18 years old to create an account

* Required fields

Already have an account? SIGN IN

By clicking Create Account you confirm that your data has been entered correctly and you have read and agree to our Terms of use , Cookie policy and Privacy policy .

This site is protected by reCAPTCHA and the Google Privacy Policy and Terms of Service apply.

Thank you for registering

Please refresh the page or navigate to another page on the site to be automatically logged in