If Only Stephen Mandel Had Been Around in Ancient Rome | A knife ban would have given Julius Caesar a very different outcome.
DETAILS
JULIUS CAESAR
Directed by James MacDonald. Written by William Shakespeare. Starring Rick Roberts, John Kirkpatrick, Blair Williams, Ashley Wright. Maclab Theatre, The Citadel. Feb 21-Mar 15. Tickets available through the Citadel box office (425-1820)
Director James MacDonald has a confession to make about his feelings regarding The Citadel’s upcoming production of Julius Caesar. “It sounds kind of simplistic to say this,” he says, “but I appreciate the fact that it does have a thriller aspect to it.”
He is, of course, referring to the fact that the play revolves around an assassination plot, the basis of many conventional thrillers. But before you go accusing him of not valuing Shakespeare’s dialogue, consider that the play has long been considered one of the Bard’s more accessible works. “The way that he uses language in this play is quite well known,” MacDonald says, “and I think [the reason for that] is because sometimes Shakespeare can be obscure and this play isn’t obscure at all — it’s very clear and to the point. There are lofty ideas that are presented, but they’re presented in such a way that make them very understandable.”
This production of Julius Caesar is MacDonald’s second ... er, stab at the play, having helmed an outdoor version more than 10 years ago for the River City Shakespeare Festival. He thinks bringing it inside allows for more effective storytelling. “One of the things that appeals most to me about this production,” he says, “is there’s a lot more intimate human emotion that’s conveyed in the play.
“Coming back to it, I think I surprised myself in how much I appreciated and enjoyed the second half of the play. People are always baffled by the fact that this play is called Julius Caesar when the title character gets killed at the halfway point. What I found really interesting about exploring it this time was looking into the cost of this assassination on the people that perpetrated it, specifically on Brutus and Cassius. They do it at great personal gamble and at great personal expense.”
It is also in the aftermath of Caesar’s murder that MacDonald thinks the play achieves much of its dramatic power, “One of the things that I discovered this time is how much mourning there is in the play and how important the honesty of the mourning is. Maybe I’m just a bit more reflective, but there’s something that appeals to me about the honest emotions that the characters undergo when they’re mourning other characters in the play.”
For this production, the set design and wardrobe have been contemporized to create a world akin to Roman society but set in modern times. “We’ve had a lot of fun with creating this world,” MacDonald says. “There are what I hope are bold choices made across the board in the design and I feel like all those choices are made with a complete fidelity to the play and to the text.... The great compliment is always ‘Wow, that was Shakespeare? I understood every word of it.’”
And in the end, it’s people’s enjoyment of the play that matters most. “I want people to be thrilled,” he says. “I’ll be honest: there’s not a lot of laughs in this play, but hopefully it can inspire some fear and some thrills and some emotional reaction as well.”
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