Donmar’s ‘Julius Caesar’ in Brooklyn

It’s a challenging theory, but director Phyllida Lloyd has applied it, with spectacular results, to her masterful Julius Caesar.

What’s so “foreign” about her production of this all-too-familiar Shakespeare play? That’s easy: This Julius Caesar boasts an all-female cast.

Wait, you might ask: Brutus and Cassius played by women? All the conspirators? Caesar, too?

Absolutely. Not a male performer in sight on that stage.

Once you’re past the jolt of surprise, you find yourself experiencing the play anew— and more. You see its relevance to what’s happening in our turbulent political world today.

Guards who mean business

Everything about this groundbreaking interpretation is jolting. You enter what appears to be a garage on a narrow Brooklyn street near the East River. The audience members are herded together, and then crash! Metallic garage doors close behind and in front of you.

Suddenly, women dressed as prison guards swarm in, barking orders, while through the walls you hear sounds of women shouting and whistles blowing. Where are we? What’s going on? This may be “immersive theater,” but these guards really seem to mean business.

Then the door before you screeches open, and you enter what looks like a gymnasium, with sharply raked bleachers on three sides of a playing space. You take your seats and are instructed to remain in them for the next two hours. (Warning: If you leave, you won’t be readmitted.)

Yes, your fears are confirmed: You’re in a woman’s prison.

Self-righteous Brutus

Another whistle blows. Enter 14 women wearing gym garb and hoodies. First they’re led in some kind of group exercise routine by one of the guards, and then suddenly one prisoner warns: “Beware the Ides of March.” Whereupon the women segue into Shakespeare’s script of Julius Caesar.

At first, we wonder why they’re performing this play. Is there a thespian society within the prison? Or is there a darker imperative for these prisoners’ artistic effort? These questions are never answered, but it really doesn’t matter, for we’re immediately drawn into the vortex of a turbulent rendition of Shakespeare’s play, as if we’re hearing it and seeing it for the first time.

It takes only moments to get over the shock that women are playing men’s roles. We forget, for example, that the slender Dame Harriet Walter, the notable British actress, plays Brutus. Instead, we’re fascinated by her unconventional interpretation of the “noble, honorable” senator – one who’s not only tortured but also too self-righteous for his own good, and whose self-delusions ultimately lead to his downfall.

At home with violence

As for Jenny Jules’s fierce Cassius, she/he has more than “a lean and hungry look.” The diminutive Jules plays Cassius as a dangerous, high-wired fanatic of the kind we see more and more on the world stage today— in countries rocked by the Arab Spring, for example.

The charismatic Frances Barber plays Caesar with an unexpected dash of humor. She's totally at home as the ultimate power figure (every prison culture has one), her stocky figure lurching around the stage in a show of flamboyance and self-importance. One moment she’s cruel, and the next, she’s playful. (At one point, Caesar opens a box of doughnuts— popular prison food— which the “men” gobble up appreciatively).

Indeed, Julius Caesar feels quite at home in a women’s prison, where eruptions of violence are common. The assassination scene is among the most violent of any interpretation I’ve seen.

Murder on video

Despite the previous night’s violent storm warnings, despite his wife Calpurnia’s admonition, this Caesar makes his fated entrance into the Senate, drawn dramatically onstage on a rolling dolly accompanied by billows of black smoke. Caesar then takes a seat right in the first row of the audience, while the assassins— dressed in black leather and red rubber gloves, their faces covered in frightening ski masks— surround and kill him to the tune of deafening rock music. (A band on the balcony accompanies some of the performance.)

One actress with a hand-held video camera projects this horrific murder on the upstage wall, so audience members watch the assassination happening right in their midst. In effect we’ve become part of the conspiracy, too.

(In a time where fanatical political conspiracies grow more dangerous and destructive— witness the Tea Party’s debacle of the past month— perhaps it’s useful that a director is goes to such extremes to make this point.)

Masters of their fate?

Every once in a while— as the actors fill the playing area and the balcony above, scaling up and down ladders, banging their plates and spoons in a cacophony of aggressive sounds – they’ll break from the script. At one intense point, the actress playing Brutus says to another who’s whispering offstage: “Shut the fuck up!” At another point, a guard interrupts the action, yelling: ‘Palmer…meds!” to summon one of the actress/prisoners to the infirmary. In this way, periodically, we’re reminded that we are watching a play within a play.

Invigorated by all these innovative elements— the all-female cast, the metatheatrical conceit— I found myself hearing Shakespeare’s lines for the first time. “The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars, but in ourselves” reminds me that we’re all implicated in the demise of leaders– ours and others— because of our own righteous, often blind, convictions.

“There is a tide in the affairs of men…” In this novel production, there’s a tide in the affairs of women, too— one in which they can feel comfortable onstage in men’s roles, and we in the audience can feel comfortable watching them.

“Men are masters of their fate.” So are women today, Lloyd’s production suggests. Each of these brave, bold actresses, as well as their director, “doth bestride the narrow world”— of the theater, at least— “like a colossus.”