Romulus kills Remus and the first blood is spilt. We repeated the manner of this savage and primal killing in the battle scenes where the soldiers, having begun in formation, disintegrate into bestial violence.
What did you make of the roles of the wives (and more locally of the odd detail of the double reporting of Portia’s suicide)?
Hall: Both the women in the play know exactly what is going on with their men. Calpurnia dreams about what is going to happen to Caesar and tells him not to go to the Senate. It is a wonderful chapter of this story: you have got a man who knows he is going to be murdered but that is not going to stop him going to the Senate because he is Caesar, and who are they to stand up against him? If he didn’t go, he wouldn’t be Caesar. He does talk about himself in the third person a lot, and so Calpurnia helps you understand the personal versus the public. I think Portia’s scene also does a few things: it underlines what a mess Brutus is in. There is this extraordinary moment where she stabs herself in the thigh. Of course, that is quite a Catholic piece of iconography: Christ’s wound in the side upon the cross, bleeding and dripping into the cup that became the Holy Grail. So it’s a very powerful image to the audience of the day; today I think it tells you that this woman is falling apart, she is so frustrated and she feels her husband’s pain so intensely. She wants to prove to her husband that she can bear the pain of whatever it is that he is not telling her. Thosetwo relationships give you a little more personal, domestic insight into the hearts and minds of the two major protagonists of the play, Brutus and Caesar, and I think without the women the play would be a much drier experience to watch.
Farr: I found that difficult because it is something that has changed with time. We looked at Eastern Europe, which is still an unbelievably male world, and that was helpful. Putin’s wife is a perfect example of someone who never ever comes out into the limelight and is constantly behind closed doors. The reason why I found it difficult is that actresses just do not get as good a role as actors. For a while I explored having female conspirators, but then of course one of the difficulties is that there is talk of women and men in the play, so if Portia is to say what she says about a woman and then there is a female conspirator it doesn’t make sense. So in the end the only other women I allowed myself were aides, political aides, messengers. I used women a lot for that, that was quite enjoyable, but we basically created a glass ceiling within a society and they weren’t allowed above a certain level. Out of a genuine desire to give female actors great roles you can unfortunately contravene basic principles of the play, whether it be Lear with his three daughters, where you can’t have women charging around the play in other roles. You’d have to completely subvert it, which would be very exciting at some point. To have a completely female leader … there is clearly a scope for that somewhere.
We felt [the double reporting of Portia’s suicide] was very clear: when Brutus reveals to Cassius that he knows about the death there is a deeply honest moment between the two men, which is clearly because of what they have just been through in the row together, and then when the other two men come in Brutus, in the Stoic tradition, fakes ignorance of it in order that he may show us the truly Stoic reaction, which is untrue, in order to keep the morale of his men high. When Messala tells him that she is dead he replies, “We all die, we must all die”; that is the Stoic reaction that he knows people are expecting from him, and it is important that he gives it to them at a time of potentially low morale amongst the army. The reality is completely different and it is a brilliant piece of writing.
Bailey : There are only two named female parts in
Julius Caesar
. Both are brilliantly
What did you make of the roles of the wives (and more locally of the odd detail of the double reporting of Portia’s suicide)?
Hall: Both the women in the play know exactly what is going on with their men. Calpurnia dreams about what is going to happen to Caesar and tells him not to go to the Senate. It is a wonderful chapter of this story: you have got a man who knows he is going to be murdered but that is not going to stop him going to the Senate because he is Caesar, and who are they to stand up against him? If he didn’t go, he wouldn’t be Caesar. He does talk about himself in the third person a lot, and so Calpurnia helps you understand the personal versus the public. I think Portia’s scene also does a few things: it underlines what a mess Brutus is in. There is this extraordinary moment where she stabs herself in the thigh. Of course, that is quite a Catholic piece of iconography: Christ’s wound in the side upon the cross, bleeding and dripping into the cup that became the Holy Grail. So it’s a very powerful image to the audience of the day; today I think it tells you that this woman is falling apart, she is so frustrated and she feels her husband’s pain so intensely. She wants to prove to her husband that she can bear the pain of whatever it is that he is not telling her. Thosetwo relationships give you a little more personal, domestic insight into the hearts and minds of the two major protagonists of the play, Brutus and Caesar, and I think without the women the play would be a much drier experience to watch.
Farr: I found that difficult because it is something that has changed with time. We looked at Eastern Europe, which is still an unbelievably male world, and that was helpful. Putin’s wife is a perfect example of someone who never ever comes out into the limelight and is constantly behind closed doors. The reason why I found it difficult is that actresses just do not get as good a role as actors. For a while I explored having female conspirators, but then of course one of the difficulties is that there is talk of women and men in the play, so if Portia is to say what she says about a woman and then there is a female conspirator it doesn’t make sense. So in the end the only other women I allowed myself were aides, political aides, messengers. I used women a lot for that, that was quite enjoyable, but we basically created a glass ceiling within a society and they weren’t allowed above a certain level. Out of a genuine desire to give female actors great roles you can unfortunately contravene basic principles of the play, whether it be Lear with his three daughters, where you can’t have women charging around the play in other roles. You’d have to completely subvert it, which would be very exciting at some point. To have a completely female leader … there is clearly a scope for that somewhere.
We felt [the double reporting of Portia’s suicide] was very clear: when Brutus reveals to Cassius that he knows about the death there is a deeply honest moment between the two men, which is clearly because of what they have just been through in the row together, and then when the other two men come in Brutus, in the Stoic tradition, fakes ignorance of it in order that he may show us the truly Stoic reaction, which is untrue, in order to keep the morale of his men high. When Messala tells him that she is dead he replies, “We all die, we must all die”; that is the Stoic reaction that he knows people are expecting from him, and it is important that he gives it to them at a time of potentially low morale amongst the army. The reality is completely different and it is a brilliant piece of writing.
Bailey : There are only two named female parts in
Julius Caesar
. Both are brilliantly
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