Julius Caesar at the Brian Cox Studio in Glasgow May 2009

A few evenings ago, I went along to the RSAMD postgrad’s production of Julius Caesar. As previously mentioned on this blog, I do not review the production as a critic, I try to engage with the issues that I found in the actor’s performance and try to address those. Caesar is a very different play from last week’s Lear. Not just in performance, but very much in the writing. It doesn’t require the same kind of constant emotional turbulence, or perhaps these actors approached it with more subtlety.

Overall, I thought that the performances were of a passable standard, although I still think that many of the actors got to grips with the language and the verse at the cost of the emotion content of the play, leaving it somewhat empty. There was quite a great deal of wandering and robot arms (thank you Ian). This lead me to believe that the actors had not absorbed what they were saying into their bodies. That sounds wanky, so I’ll explain. I believe that Shakespeare is both simple and complex. On an intellectual level, he is incredibly complex, physically and vocally, he is challenging but he is also incredibly simple. Every monologue has a simple structure and you can easily work out what the character is trying to do to the other character and find a way to connect to that. There is no excuse for the head to act and the body not to follow with it.

Some of the parts required more meat, or perhaps I like my Shakespeare like I like my steak: EITHER bloody well done or raw and bloody. This was well warmed. Again, we’re talking about a connection to the role and trying to do REAL things to real people. This was better than in the production of Lear, but the emotional challenge was also less in this production.

There was one truly captivating moment in the play: a gentlemen wandered onto the stage, looked a bit confused, stopped, looked a bit embarrassed and eventually found a seat. This fellow was so captivating because he was entirely truthfully, everything he did was real, and I couldn’t take my eyes off him. Yet, he was of course, just a late audience member but what can we learn from him? That the truth is captivating in a way that pretend cannot be.  Just like last week, the actors took to ‘pretend’ for many of their most difficult moments. How can they avoid this? By learning how to connect to the play, to the moment and to each other. Then all their verse training will come to something.

I’m not trying to denigrate the hard work of these actors in training, I truly believe they worked their balls off in this show, they deserve plaudits for facing the challenge and facing it well. But I wanted, I WILL them to do more. This is now the third time that I’ve seen the RSAMD postgrads working, each time they get better, but each time, the challenge increases – as it should. I am looking forward to their next production. Next week, it’s the turn of the undergraduates…

The women’s parts in Shakespeare are tough. The actors playing the women’s roles had a difficult job to do and both pitched the emotionality too wildly. There wasn’t a grain of truth in it. That’s not to say that the performance was bad, it wasn’t, but the lack of truth failed to captivate me. Failed to make me feel something. If you want to make me feel something, you have to hold something back yourself.

Actually, the show made me want to read Shakespeare more, so I went out and bought Taming of the Shrew today. I’m going to bed now to read it. Night Night.