Julius Caesar by William Shakespeare. Bell Shakespeare at Canberra Theatre Centre, The Playhouse April 10 -18 2026
Duration: 2 hour and 35 minutes, includinginterval
Reviewed by Frank McKone
April 11 – Opening Night
By William Shakespeare
Director & Set Designer: Peter Evans
Associate Director: Jessica Tovey
Costume Designer: Simone Romaniuk
Lighting Designer: Amelia Lever-Davidson
Composer & Sound Designer: Madeleine Picard
Fight and Movement Director: Tim Dashwood
Voice Director: Jack Starkey-Gill
Draftsperson: Dallas Winspear
Intimacy Coordinator: Caroline Kaspar
Associate Dramaturg: Jeremi Campese
Cast:
Cassius – Leon Ford; Portia – Jules Billington; Casca – Peter Carroll
Julius Caesar – Septimus Caton; Metellus – Ray Chong Nee
Decius – James Lugton; Calphurnia – Ava Madon
Cinna – Ruby Maishman; Mark Antony – Mark Leonard Winter
Brutus – Brigid Zengeni;
Understudy – Olivia Ayoub; Understudy – Oliver Crawford
“It’s been more than 450 years since a monarch ruled in Rome. But now, in the senate and the streets, the forum and the marketplace, the word ‘king’ is being whispered again.”
“Betrayal and chaos rock the republic as Rome teeters on the brink of collapse.”
https://www.bellshakespeare.com.au/julius-caesar
It’s been 237 years since a monarch ruled in America. But now, in protest demonstrations across the nation, the word ‘king’ is being called out again. It’s not unreasonable, I think, to say that Trump’s USA “teeters on the brink of collapse.”
So a kind of up-market corporate modern dress, and women playing forceful roles in social change, makes for an appropriate approach to interpreting William Shakespeare’s play where, in the original production (426 years ago) – in Elizabethan Costumes as Status Symbols – London Johns explains:
“The aim of many modern costume designers is to create a sense of realism. Plays set in a particular location and era require actors to dress in a way that communicates their characters’ time period and culture.
Elizabethan costumes were created with different goals. Instead of conveying their characters’ positions in history, costumes were primarily intended to communicate their characters’ rank in a social hierarchy.
The anachronism of Elizabethan costumes was a product of a society obsessed with visual markers of social status, where rank determined what kind of clothes people could and could not wear.”
https://yalehistoricalreview.ghost.io/the-hatch-and-brood-of-time-18
In fact, to re-emphasise her power, Queen Elizabeth I imposed rigid rules about costume, both by day and on stage.
Peter Evans has clearly appreciated why Shakespeare chose to stage the attempt and failure of Julius Caesar to take on absolute power as emperor, while Elizabeth had only recently succeeded (with the help of bad weather) in destroying the Spanish Armada of a challenging despot in 1588, Philip II (Felipe II), a member of the European Habsburg dynasty, who ruled a global empire that included Spain, the Netherlands, and parts of Italy and the Americas, from 1556 to 1598.
Philip was called el Prudente, but if his Armada had succeeded, he would have restored Catholicism in England; and what would have happened to Elizabeth and the Tudors’ Church of England could be anybody’s guess.
What will Donald Trump’s future be, as he ignores Constitutional restraints on the power of a President?
That’s the why? Now for the wherefore of Bell Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar.
The directing and the performances are top class – among the best of Peter Evans work. Beginning as a group of actors about to tell us a story, with a prologue including recognition of the First Nations people who have performed their stories where Canberra Theatre stands for many more thousands of years than the 2000 since Julius Caesar was murdered, we are set up in the right relationship with a modern company presenting us with Shakespeare’s play.
This allows us to accept changes to the playscript that bring out modern issues, especially the role of women as equals in status and political power as men. Brutus is not only played by a woman actor, but is a female character, married to her wife, Portia.
At first it took me a little while to accept, because Shakespeare had men whose names, from the Latin, end in ‘us’; while his women had names ending in ‘a’.
The change does an odd thing: the irony of the sound and meaning of his name – Brutus – when he is quite the opposite of a brute (so unlike the determined Cassius, and up-himself Caesar) is re-emphasised when she is clearly so in love with Portia, who tries so hard to keep her out of trouble, saying “You’ve ungently, Brutus, stole from my bed”, and they kiss passionately as she still decides she has to go, saying to her justifiably anxious wife: “And by and by thy bosom shall partake the secrets of my heart”. All played with great depth of feeling by Brigid Zengeni and Jules Billington.
When Caesar says as he is stabbed “Et tu, Brute!”, he really is astounded.
And then there’s Cassius, played so powerfully by Leon Ford as a man angered in the extreme by this self-flattering manipulative Caesar (who had to remind me, of course, of Donald Trump) not just because of the lie that his taking more power is good for Rome, but because of how Caesar looks down on him as a lower class of person.
Ford, beyond other Cassius’s, takes us into his conflicted mind, so angry that the moral concern against killing has to be overcome, but so worried about his sister and whether she will be alright if she takes on killing Caesar.
In original history, which Shakespeare kept to, Cassius was married to Brutus’ sister Junia Tertia, but in Bell Shakespeare Brutus’s feelings for her ‘brother’ Cassius are stronger than ever.
Even Shakespeare had a problem with the play fading away in the second half, drowning a bit too much in the details of the battle at Philippi. But here, in Bell Shakespeare Modern, we feel for and understand why Cassius and Brutus finally commit suicide – because they have failed themselves as much as having failed Rome.
Not to be missed – one of Bell Shakespeare’s best. And I have to say the revival of Peter Carroll as Casca is just wonderful for the warmth of his comedy (for us) despite his confusion (for Casca).
And also make it clear that everyone in this complicated cast got everything right.
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| Photo: Brett Boardman |