There’s no stopping designer William Dudley on his lone crusade to turn theatres into senssurround cinemas with video projections doing the job of scenery. Next up is Peter Pan flying round a virtual Neverland in Kensington Gardens, following on his filmic, non-stop vistas in The Coast of Utopia and The Woman in White.

But the new Julius Caesar at Stratford goes even further, with a crowd of replicated film extras boosting the crowd scenes and generally carrying on like a regimented troupe of Pina Bausch dancers.

This celluloid mob is life-sized and choreographed on six gauze screens that swing into the thrust stage area as if they might actually come to life and run across the Roman forum. That would be a very funny thing to happen on the way to it.

Something even funnier happened on opening night: the ghostly plebs took their very own curtain call, bowing in unison and then — wait for it — waving at the audience! Max Reinhardt, thou shouldst be living at this hour.

When John Gielgud played Caesar at the National in John Schlesinger’s production he was dismayed to learn that there would only be about twenty-five bods in the crowd. He was used to seeing a hundred supernumeraries at least in the revivals of his youth, something both Peter Stein and Deborah Warner have harked back to by employing loads of unpaid amateurs to swell the ranks.

Which raises another issue: do the unidentified, admittedly somewhat blurred, individuals in the mob scenes get appearance fees, or are they just lumped into the overall design budget, treated like the serfs and underlings they play on film?

Lucy Bailey’s exciting production poses all sorts of questions like these, and you have to say that the interaction between the frieze-like extras and the speaking crowd (about eight of them) in the oration scene is pretty good, as are the fight scenes with the animated adversaries coming at us like 3-D entrants in a Spartacus look-alike competition.

There was a classic first night howler, a real collectors’ item, too: Greg Hicks, playing Caesar, tripped on his toga and fell on his fanny just as he declared that he was as constant as the northern star.
 
He recovered well, though, only to be stabbed to death for his pains. He’s a rather young and lightweight Caesar, and Sam Troughton’s stocky Brutus and John Mackay’s epicene Cassius — he’s a bit like Mark Gatiss in The League of Gentlemen — don’t really measure up to the standards in the RSC pantheon in these roles.

One former RSC Brutus, John Nettles, looked happy enough, though, in the stalls. And RSC associate Tony Sher told me that the book cover portrait he once drew of me — sitting, as it happens, in the cinema seats of the old Shakespeare Theatre stalls — would be among the exhibits of his forthcoming National Theatre show. I wonder how much I’ll go for?!     

It was a pleasant afternoon and evening by the Avon. I met a couple of friends in the stunning new fish bar, Bernadettes, for a glass of champagne — you can sit on a roof terrace and look out over the town across to Holy Trinity Church –  and much enjoyed my pre-show dinner in Lamb’s.

The Stratford waterside has recovered, just about, from a weekend aberration when a madman went on the rampage in the Dirty Duck and tore the place apart before moving on to another couple of hostelries and doing the same.

Which only goes to show the wisdom of keeping your lower classes where they belong: at the back of the stage and walled up inside the special effects department. Maybe Bill Dudley’s onto something after all.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, May 27th, 2009 at 12:11 pm and is filed under Michael Coveney. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.