In 2012 I started on what has become a four-year, three-play, all-female Shakespeare project with the director Phyllida Lloyd and the Donmar Warehouse. This, and the following chapter, are written in the midst of it. After playing the first part of this trilogy, Julius Caesar, at the Donmar in 2012, we took it to St Ann’s Warehouse in Brooklyn in 2013.
It sometimes takes a woman to show us what men are truly made of. Just as a skilled drag queen reminds us of the artifice that shapes our images of femininity, women portraying macho men highlight what’s grotesque and confining in traditionally masculine postures.
Ben Brantley, New York Times
Who is Entitled?
Where do you go after Cleopatra’s magnificent death? Alright, there is Volumnia, or the Countess of Rousillon; Paulina is a possible, and there’s mad Margaret; but that is pretty well it, and none of them has the infinite variety of the Egyptian Queen.
Playing Cleopatra, I had learnt new lessons and reached new heights—or plateaux—from which I could see a further range above me that I hadn’t known was there, but those lessons looked like they would never be put into practice and those further peaks would remain on the horizon never to be scaled.
Then along came Phyllida Lloyd and her idea of an all-female Shakespeare season at the Donmar Warehouse. It was not a new idea. A handful of women have played male roles in every century since Shakespeare died. Nor was it the first time anyone had talked to me about playing a male role in Shakespeare, but things had remained at the talking stage.
Phyllida caught me at a time when I had accepted that my Shakespeare days were over. I was lucky to keep busy with other work on stage and screen, but there was always that low background hum of longing for Shakespeare. To be barred from speaking those words, from that lung-filling, mind-altering, self-testing practice, was like being a concert pianist forbidden to open the lid of the piano.
As Phyllida’s idea took deeper root, we overcame our initial doubts and became sure that there was something a group of women could say by performing these male plays.
The classics are revisited for what they can tell us about our world today, and the world today is much more feminised than in Shakespeare’s lifetime. Women, in the West at least, have access to perform in any and every field of public endeavour, in theory at least. Could we not play the male leaders in our national playwright’s canon? And if it looked or felt wrong, wouldn’t we have to ask ourselves useful questions as to why? We are continually broadening the definition of what a man or a woman is, so couldn’t we be holding Shakespeare’s mirror up to the nature of a more current world?
The problem to me had always been permission: permission from the public and permission from myself. I may have wanted to keep in the Shakespeare game, but if that meant playing men, the public didn’t need to watch me do it. This was why I had never taken the idea further than speculation. I needed Phyllida’s nerve and thereby her permission. What could I as a performer bring to any male role that a male could not do better? Would it not just be a vanity exercise?
Then I thought, hey! What male actor do I know who would not jump at playing Hamlet for the sake of playing Hamlet, never mind that the world arguably does not need another one for a decade? The public will go to these productions in search of the latest bearer of the ‘Great Actor’ baton from Richard Burbage, through Garrick, Kean, Irving, Gielgud, David Warner, Jonathan Pryce, Mark Rylance, Ben Whishaw, and on and on, all in their way personifying the hero or anti-hero of our age. There is no questioning any male actor’s right to take up the torch. But what right have I…?
In my very coyness lurked a revelation. I had a typically female attitude. I didn’t feel entitled. We women can be as ambitious as men and as hungry, but then that old chestnut of needing to be liked rears its head. It sounds daft but it is a not-to-be-ignored factor that contributes to women’s ongoing underachievement in the top echelons of public life. A woman CEO or police commander or politician not only has to do a demanding job but in addition she must be armed against a mass of prejudice and personal dislike that will inevitably come her way. You only have to look at the vile, personal, sexist attacks in the media during Hillary Clinton’s election campaigns in 2008 and 2016, to see that irrational antagonism against a woman is somehow deemed an acceptable form of public discussion. The equivalent racism against Barack Obama had to be more carefully disguised. A large number of women have decided that this kind of institutional misogyny is too high a price to pay for doing a tough job and prefer to balance career achievements with social acceptability and family life.
But I am only an actor. Could I not risk a bit of criticism from my male colleagues and male critics? Of course I bloody could. So I put off worrying about such things till opening night and committed myself to the journey with Phyllida.
We wondered which play to pick. On Phyllida’s shortlist were Romeo and Juliet, Julius Caesar and Hamlet. Julius Caesar won almost because it was the least obvious for women to play. Love is the customary territory for Shakespeare’s women, and Hamlet is a bit of a solo act. Julius Caesar is about power, the struggle for it, the gaining of it and how to use it when you have it. The prospect of women playing out that story from inside male characters quickly excited me.
We talked much of how to ‘justify’ an all-female Julius Caesar, and one day Phyllida came in with the idea of setting the play in a female prison. The advantages of this were that we would be de-sexed by our uniform, it would explain why there were no male actors, the violence and aggression in the play would be more convincing in a prison context, and it is no stretch to imagine prisoners playing Shakespeare as it is now a fairly common practice for actors to do workshops in prisons.
By coincidence I had just been performing a scene from King Lear with a young Serbian prisoner in a correction centre in Malta with Bruce Wall’s London Shakespeare Workout, and my loose connection with his wonderful group had familiarised me with the benefits of prisoners playing Shakespeare. I knew there were many such groups doing wonderful things, giving voices to the most forgotten people and confidence to people of rock-bottom self-esteem. The work does not wave a Pollyanna wand, but it does leave people changed in their view of themselves as individuals and it welcomes them in as participants in a shared story of humanity. So Phyllida’s idea seemed not only to be totally grounded in possibility, but also provided a perfect metaphor for the way women’s voices are largely excluded from the centre of our cultural history.
I wasn’t sure at first which part I wanted to play. It never having been a possibility, I had never thought about playing Brutus, but after a bit of discussion I agreed to play him. So how would the rest of the cast be picked? There are enough experienced, talented female actors of my age group and younger to cast the play six times over, but once the prison idea had established itself, we needed a cast that could believably represent the racial and social mix of a prison population. This prerequisite sent the casting net far wider than the typical RSC or Globe or National Theatre lists, so during the auditioning process I met female performers from all backgrounds, disciplines and degrees of experience, and I was privy to some wonderfully creative discussions between Phyllida and the Donmar’s casting genius, Anne McNulty.
To add into the mix, I had long been a patron of Clean Break, a theatre company set up by two women, while they themselves were in prison, to explore the inmates’ lives and prison issues through drama and which went on to develop into the producing/training/commissioning powerhouse it is now. I suggested that we might collaborate with them in some way, and so the Donmar hired some Clean Break actors, who brought a completely fresh tone to Shakespeare and at the same time provided us with invaluable first-hand knowledge of prison life to make the setting feel as authentic as possible.
If a white, middle-class, educated Shakespeare pro like me felt a lack of entitlement, how must a young black woman from South London who had never spoken a word of Shakespeare feel? I discovered that one or two of the very youngest members of the cast had a sort of ‘What’s the problem?’ attitude which I found very hopeful. It seemed that their generation were already blurring the edges between genders, classes and race and had not bought into the cultural segregation that the older ones had grown up with. One of the most rewarding outcomes of the whole adventure was to watch various company members grow in confidence and ability before my eyes. It was humbling to realise that the audience felt no distinction between my achievement, building on my whole Shakespearean career, and that of a first-time player. What rocked them was the total commitment, clarity and energy they got off each and every one of us. None of us took this privilege for granted as perhaps some male actors might do. We were all contributing wholeheartedly to creating a believable world, and the audience willingly suspended their disbelief. If any one of us had dropped the ball, we would have shattered the whole illusion, and I, for one, would have felt a total fraud.
Brutus and ‘Hannah’
In preparation for rehearsals, Phyllida and I visited a group of women in Holloway Prison and did some workshops with them. It was a frustratingly short interlude, and the prison agenda tended to marginalise our work, changing the attendees of the group at the last minute, whisking people out to take their ‘meds’, shunting us from one un-atmospheric room to another. On one occasion, while our group were passionately acting out the murder of Caesar, someone bashed into the room and started energetically working a floor-polisher under and around our feet with a disregard for what we were doing that was so astonishing as to inspire a brief interlude in the final production.
From the Holloway women we did get confirmation that the play was the right one to do. The themes of violence, loyalty, competition, suicide, and the marginalised quality of the domestic scenes all resonated with them. We were also encouraged by how speedily they had grasped the meaning of the text, and, in one case at least, we saw a budding natural talent for verse speaking.
When the cast met for rehearsals we watched some TV documentaries about British women’s prisons and noticed how so many women aped male behaviour and played out relationships with one another that mirrored the male/female relationships they experienced on the outside. There were many self-harmers (a link to Portia’s desperate act of wounding herself in the thigh), but there was also a lot of humour and paradoxically a lot of tenderness. All of these qualities could be used in our play.
For me the elephant in the room was: ‘What would a person like Harriet Walter be doing in a prison?’ Most women in prison in this country shouldn’t be there. A tiny percentage have committed violent acts. Nearly all of their crimes are petty and a huge percentage are drug-related. An even more interesting statistic is that nearly all women in jail are there because of a man in their life: a pimp, a drug dealer, or a violent partner. I came from a privileged, enlightened background and what I most feared was having to ‘pretend’ too much. I already needed to suspend people’s disbelief by playing a Roman general, but on top of that I needed people to believe in a prisoner who could act fluently in Shakespeare’s language.
Phyllida had encouraged each of us to invent a prison character who in some way matched our Shakespeare character. To make any other choice would be unproductive. One of our Clean Break members helped us rank our characters in a prison hierarchy, for such a thing exists, whereby some crimes are more respected than others. Thus the actress playing Cinna the Poet, who is violently beaten up by the mob, chose to be in for a hit-and-run car accident, a low status, much despised crime, which upped the ante in the fight which got out of hand and tipped over into something rather too real (but of course not real).
So who would my character be? My little acting mantra that I use in the wings or when first approaching a character is ‘This could be me’. If I were not born into my circumstances at my time into this body, I could be any other human being. It is the actor’s version of time travel. So, given that social advantages and education reduce the likelihood of committing crimes, why might someone like me land up in prison? Driving offences? Sure. Some kind of tax fraud? Quite possible. Manslaughter? Not impossible. But none of these matched Brutus.
My Clean Break friend told us how someone with education would command immediate respect, not necessarily affection but a recognition of potential authority. That respect could be built on or lost depending on how that prisoner continued to behave. I needed to find a prison character who wanted to put her education to helpful use, someone who had earned respect over a period of time, so probably serving a long sentence. Someone who, like Brutus, passionately and genuinely cared about the principle of democracy, who needed to expiate a past guilt and believed in redemption. She was beginning to shape up into a political prisoner, a revolutionary who in her youth had rebelled against the system of privilege that had formed her. I was the right generation for this kind of profile, but Britain did not have any political prisoners, now that the IRA have been released. How about Baader-Meinhof? Patty Hearst? All too specific geographically. Nevertheless, I followed this idea through, and, given that our stage prison was not supposed to mirror any particular factual prison, I created Hannah.
Hannah was a combination of people I had read about, in particular one: Judith Clark, an American prisoner jailed for life for her involvement in a bank robbery conducted by an anti-capitalist revolutionary group in the early 1980s. Three people died as a result of the raid, and although Clark was only the getaway driver, through a combination of being in the wrong place at the wrong time and extreme non-cooperation (she refused to attend her own trial in protest against the entire legal system), she received a longer sentence (life without parole) than the rest of the gang, even than the trigger-pullers. She is a mother and a grandmother and has had to face her own terrible feelings of guilt for the life she has led her family into. When I read about this woman it was in a fairly recent article describing her complete turnaround over her years in jail. A story so profound that I cannot even begin it here. Suffice to say, I could latch on to her as a real person to feed into my speculative creation, Hannah.
Hannah/Judith could be me. Hannah would become a mentor figure to the other women, a teacher with a missionary zeal to equip them with an education and skills with which to improve their lives. Hannah might well have learnt her Shakespeare by joining one of Bruce Wall’s visiting groups, and she might have earned enough trust from the prison staff to be charged with helping to put on a play and passing on her skills. She would definitely have seen Julius Caesar as a perfect vehicle in which to play out her own inner debates, and she would care desperately about getting it right. The production would be the be-all-and-end-all of her otherwise barren prison days.
Hannah/Judith was a far more extreme politico than I had ever been and is now a far more profound and brave woman than I expect ever to be. I would have to reach for her just as I have to reach beyond myself to the noble Brutus.
So Who is Brutus?
He is a patrician from an ancient Roman family. He is part of the establishment and has the ear of Caesar. He has recently fought against Caesar in the war with Pompey, a fact that Caesar seems to have forgiven. His wife Portia is the daughter of Cato, himself no lover of Caesar’s; but I won’t embark on the inter-familial entanglements of the Roman world. It is enough to know that Brutus is conflicted. He is also the most universally respected man of the moment. Cinna, one of the conspirators against Caesar, shows us a hint of Brutus’s particular importance to their cause:
O Cassius, if you could
But win the noble Brutus to our party—
tailing off because it seems an impossible dream as Brutus is so close to Caesar.
Cassius is the most purely revolutionary character in the play. He is not hampered by love of Caesar as Brutus is. He is clear-eyed about the situation, saying:
Caesar doth bear me hard; but he loves Brutus.
He knows that Brutus has more to lose, but precisely because he is seen by the people to be respected by Caesar, Brutus will have a vital role to play as unifier after Caesar’s assassination. He is the key man. The conspirators cannot act without him.
In his opening scene with Brutus we see Cassius avidly searching Brutus’s face for clues to his thoughts and ready to pounce on Brutus’s verbal hesitations as signs of a chink in his armour. He knows he can play on Brutus’s genuine passion for republicanism and his hatred of Caesar’s increasingly despotic regime. By the end of the scene he can say:
Well, Brutus, thou art noble; yet, I see,
Thy honourable metal may be wrought
From that it is disposed.
A little further tipping (by way of some anonymous notes), and Brutus is won over to the cause. Cassius has worked on Brutus rather as Lady Macbeth works on her husband. Cassius knows Brutus’s heart and prods his deeper ambition into action. As Hamlet says: ‘Conscience doth make cowards of us all’, but once Brutus has wrestled with his conscience, he rushes to the forefront of the fight and puts his doubts behind him. For a while…
I had never realised what a complex and interesting character Brutus is. In the Shakespeare panoply he is related to both Hamlet and Macbeth, almost as mentally tortured as the former, almost as guilt-ridden as the latter, but not as self-explicit as either. It made his soliloquies quite tantalising. He is a private man who can’t even open up to his best friend, Cassius:
Vexed I am
Of late with passions of some difference,
Conceptions only proper to myself.
Even when he does privately talk to the audience he is oblique, and this seems to indicate that he is not even sure what he himself thinks, or is it that he is not 100 per cent honest with himself, unable to look his own ambition and darker tendencies straight in the eye?
All this made his first soliloquy extremely tricky. I thought I knew what he was feeling, but he never quite expressed it, and it was therefore almost impossible to convey to the audience. I even wondered if it was a speech that Shakespeare had written for another play and had it knocking around in a bottom drawer waiting to slot it in somewhere, so inappropriate was some of it to the situation.
For a start, by the time he was assassinated, Caesar had already destroyed the whole notion of Republicanism. He had abolished elections, limited the powers of the law courts, stopped free speech… the list goes on. So Rome was already a dictatorship. But Brutus keeps referring to a potential dictatorship that might arise if nothing is done to stop it. He says Caesar ‘may do danger’ (my emphasis), and that ‘lowliness is young ambition’s ladder’. What has that got to do with the well-established fifty-six-year-old Caesar? Following through with the ladder metaphor, he talks of people pulling the ladder up behind them, ‘so Caesar may’ and, ‘lest he may, prevent’.
Another metaphor he uses is that of letting loose ‘the adder… that craves wary walking’, and he resolves to think of Caesar ‘as a serpent’s egg / Which, hatch’d, would, as his kind, grow mischievous’, and so best to ‘kill him in the shell’.
None of these reasons is strong enough to justify murder. You don’t kill someone because they might become a monster. A man like Brutus could never be persuaded to assassinate a leader and a friend unless things had reached a point of no return, but Shakespeare robbed him (and me) of the most powerful arguments.
The one thing I could seize on was the imminent danger that Caesar is to be crowned King the next day. It is hard to convey to a modern audience the dread that the word ‘King’ held for the Romans. Caesar as King would be worse even than Caesar the dictator, because kings form dynasties. Their unelected sons become kings after them, and inherited power was the antithesis of Republicanism. Once the crown was on Caesar’s head there would be no going back. It must be now and ‘It must be by his death’.
Out of my frustration at Brutus’s equivocation I discovered that that was the point. Shakespeare was interested in a man ‘with himself at war’. He wanted to show a man of conscience, a decent man, one whom we would quite like to take over the country, searching his heart and trying to stoke himself up to a terrible act by way of some pretty spurious arguments. So I reconciled myself to the fact that the speech tells us more about Brutus than about what is really happening.
‘Brutus is an honourable man’…
…is almost an advertising slogan that Brutus himself has bought into. The number of times he refers to his own honour seems to protest a little too much. Cynics say that is because he is as nakedly ambitious as the next man but won’t admit it to himself, but I am not a cynic and I don’t believe Shakespeare wants to tell that particular story about the hero/anti-hero of the play. I think Brutus is certainly not without ambition and fears it in himself. He frequently restates the slogan of his honour because he wants to live up to his ideal and needs a reminder to keep himself on track. He sees with clarity that
The abuse of greatness is, when it disjoins
Remorse from power.
He wants to believe that moral integrity and leadership can coexist so he strives to become the change he wants to see in the world. Being a cynical, power-hungry villain is easy by comparison.
Brutus so desperately needs to think himself honourable that he has to disguise murder as something more acceptable to his conscience. To the conspirators he advocates carving Caesar’s body as ‘a dish fit for the gods’. He so needs the world to think him honourable that he gives a tutorial on how to spin a word (my emphasis):
Let us be sacrificers, but not butchers…
Which so appearing to the common eyes,
We shall be call’d purgers, not murderers.
This same need informs his argument against killing Mark Antony:
Our course will seem too bloody.
He is also no stranger to duplicity, urging the conspirators to go to the Capitol looking ‘fresh and merrily’:
Let not our looks put on our purposes,
But bear it as our Roman actors do.
It is hard, within the body of the text, to find any proof of love between Brutus and Caesar. Shakespeare doesn’t give them a scene together or any other chance to demonstrate it. The only clues are in Brutus’s protestations to Cassius of his love for Caesar, and Caesar’s enshrined dying words, ‘Et tu, Brute’, designed to bed themselves into Brutus’s conscience forever. In our 2012 version Caesar was played as a monstrous manipulator punishing or petting in equal, unpredictable measure. The prison character was called Frankie, and her prison identity was ambiguous. Some saw her as alpha bitch, some as top prison rebel, in and out of solitary, some as mother/father figure. Her true identity would be revealed in the last seconds of the play.
Whoever she was, it was clear that she had top status, with Brutus/Hannah close behind. We decided that she had directed the play, and this accounted for her continuing watchful presence long after Caesar’s death, just as the ghost of Caesar hovers over Shakespeare’s play.
At the point of doing the bloody deed, all Brutus’s protective words desert him. Murder is murder. He will find it harder to believe in his own honour from now on. In contrast to Macbeth, whose first treacherous act tips him down an irreversible slide to evil, Brutus just becomes more and more desperate for a good end to justify the means.
I often thought of Barack Obama—that rare creature: a morally intelligent leader—and how some of his well-intentioned decisions have not always been the best political ones. When Brutus argues against Cassius’s idea of killing Mark Antony as well as Caesar, and when, later, he gives Mark Antony permission to speak at Caesar’s funeral, he inadvertently sets in motion the destruction of everything he and his co-conspirators have fought for. He hopes that allowing Mark Antony to live and to speak will demonstrate to the world that theirs will be a reasonable and transparent government. Cassius is the shrewder, less trusting politician; and the play tragically proves him right.
Brutus also misjudges the crowd when he has his chance to justify the assassination. The real Brutus was a lawyer, and Shakespeare gives him all the advantages of a great legal orator. If we look at the following speech, we find the rule of three frequently used for climactic effect. We see antithetical slogans with plenty of good soundbites for memorising:
and
Had you rather Caesar were living and die all slaves, than that Caesar were dead, to live all free men?
We see the neat pay-off of word set against word, and in particular his own buzz-word, ‘honour’, which he can assume the crowd attaches to him:
believe me for mine honour, and have respect to mine honour, that you may believe.
He offers them his own tears for his friend, but hatred for Caesar’s ‘ambition’ (which I found a totally unhelpful understatement with which to put my case)—and in the speech below I have marked how he breaks out of the rule of three to add a fourth by way of emphasising how Caesar’s ambition oversteps the bounds.
Finally he uses a rhetorical structure to emotionally blackmail any disbelievers into buttoning their lips and joining the cause.
Romans (1), countrymen (2), and lovers (3)!
Hear me for my cause, and be silent, that you may hear (1): believe me for mine honour, and have respect to mine honour, that you may believe (2): censure me in your wisdom, and awake your senses, that you may the better judge (3).
If there be any in this assembly, any dear friend of Caesar’s, to him I say, that Brutus’ love to Caesar was no less than his. If then that friend demand why Brutus rose against Caesar, this is my answer:
—Not that I loved Caesar less, but that I loved Rome more.
Had you rather Caesar were living and die all slaves, than that Caesar were dead, to live all free men?
As Caesar loved me, I weep for him (1); as he was fortunate, I rejoice at it (2); as he was valiant, I honour him (3): but, as he was ambitious, I slew him (4). There is tears for his love (1); joy for his fortune (2); honour for his valour (3); and death for his ambition (4).
Who is here so base that would be a bondman? If any, speak; for him have I offended (1).
Who is here so rude that would not be a Roman? If any, speak; for him have I offended (2). Who is here so vile that will not love his country? If any, speak; for him have I offended (3). I pause for a reply…
Then none have I offended.
It is a brilliant speech, but not brilliant enough.
The crowd are won over, but Mark Antony wins them back by hitting so many more of the people’s buttons than Brutus ever could. The revolution against Caesar was essentially an upper-class revolution and so failed to get the people behind it. The upper class were more or less under house arrest, and, being close to power, they keenly felt the lack of it. By contrast, Caesar had been clever enough to keep the lower classes relatively well fed and content. The conspirators’ mistake was in not recognising that these people bore Caesar no grudge, and even loved him. Mark Antony was able to play on this and kick the country into civil war.
Men Don’t Cry
Masculinity is a carapace that protects men in battle: hard but inflexible, strong yet brittle. It permits no expression of feelings, doubt or weakness.
Grayson Perry
When we had asked the female prisoners in Holloway what they thought women could bring to Julius Caesar that men wouldn’t, several answered ‘emotion’.
We next see Brutus at the height of the war. His feelings are raw. He may have killed his leader only to supplant him with an even worse order. The only way he can live with this thought is to believe his way of honour can win. It must. Then he learns that his closest ally Cassius has been sanctioning bribes, and the two men have a stormy row in Brutus’s tent.
This is the most brilliant scene in the play, and the fact that it was acted by women gave it a double life. On the one hand two men, whose brotherly bond only soldiers can know; on the other two women shouting at one another, physically threatening and pushing each other. Physical closeness has very different connotations for men and women, as does overt aggression—something females practically never show in friendship and certainly would not easily recover from in the way that Brutus and Cassius do.
We actresses focused on each of our character’s passionate views. Brutus/Hannah is full of idealistic anger:
shall we now
Contaminate our fingers with base bribes,
And sell the mighty space of our large honours?
Cassius (prisoner name: Noma) lashes out in defence of pragmatism:
In such a time as this it is not meet
That every nice offence should bear his comment.
Women actors brought out the school playground nature of the male posturing…
CASSIUS:
I am a soldier, I,
Older in practice, abler than yourself
To make conditions.
BRUTUS:
Go to; you are not, Cassius.
CASSIUS:
I am.
BRUTUS:
I say you are not…
…I said, an elder soldier, not a better:
Did I say ‘better’?
BRUTUS:
If you did, I care not.
But it also showed how emotionally entangled these warrior men are. The following extract reminds one of a marital row.
CASSIUS:
You love me not.
BRUTUS:
I do not like your faults.
CASSIUS:
A friendly eye could never see such faults.
BRUTUS:
A flatterer’s would not, though they do appear
As huge as high Olympus.
It culminates in a great histrionic demonstration by Cassius and a threat of suicide—
There is my dagger,
And here my naked breast…
Strike, as thou didst at Caesar; for, I know,
When thou didst hate him worst, thou lovedst him better
Than ever thou lovedst Cassius
—proving that men do use emotional blackmail in their arguments just as they accuse women of doing.
It has the right effect. Cassius’s alter-ego, Noma, had been a self-harmer. For any audience close enough to see, she had a criss-cross of scarring all up her arms. Hannah rushes in to take the knife off her (or the sharpened toothbrush handle as used in prisons) and rocks her in her arms. This action matches the men’s tender words. Brutus is about to reveal that Portia has just committed suicide in despair at how the war is turning out. To also have the blood of his closest friend on his hands would have been too much to bear.
The audience don’t need to know of all these layers beneath the scene. In fact they shouldn’t know. Shakespeare drops the bombshell of Portia’s death simply and quietly after the row has died down. It may retrospectively explain Brutus’s fierceness, but Shakespeare deliberately delays our feelings of sympathy for Brutus.
Phyllida further delayed the audience’s sympathy by staging a ‘breakout’ moment (as we called them). In the tiny turnaround time between the end of the row and Brutus’s announcement of Portia’s death, some of the inmates started giggling and talking loudly outside ‘the tent’. Hannah was so 200 per cent engaged in the project for all her own personal reasons and this was such a highly charged moment in the play that I/Hannah broke out of character, rushed up to the disruptors and blasted them with something different every night depending on my whim. It was deliberately inappropriate and startling. I won’t analyse the effect on the audience because I am not entirely sure what it was, but it shifted the ground and upped the stakes and reminded people that a theatre can be an unsafe and unpredictable place. Was that Brutus? A prisoner? or Harriet Walter losing the plot?
I am not sure whether the incident helped or hindered me in getting back to Brutus’s grief as he tells Cassius of Portia’s death. It was a wonderful moment to play. This simple line coming from left field during their conversation: ‘Portia is dead.’
Cassius is stopped in his tracks: ‘Ha! Portia!’
Brutus repeats, ‘She is dead.’
It is stated unhistrionically. Then Brutus gives way to tears but very abruptly cuts off with ‘Speak no more of her. Give me a bowl of wine.’ Back to business. Where are the generals? Come in, chaps. Let’s talk strategy. But then Shakespeare does this extraordinary thing, and, as often happens, something puzzling in the text forces up an interesting discovery. General Messala asks Brutus whether he has heard any news of his wife. Brutus says no. Is this a mistake? Was this scene written earlier than the one before and Shakespeare had forgotten to edit it out? What is this about?
The general hums and haws, and Brutus says, ‘Out with it’: ‘As you are a Roman tell me true.’ The general then tells him Portia is dead, and Brutus reacts in the strangest way:
Why, farewell, Portia. We must die, Messala:
With meditating that she must die once,
I have the patience to endure it now.
And then I understood. Messala’s next words are:
Even so great men great losses should endure.
Brutus has used the moment to demonstrate to his men a patrician self-restraint that we know is not the whole picture. It rings bells even now when men are trained not to cry and certainly not in public. Tears cloud the judgment and leaders need to be clear.
As a woman playing the part of a man under such cultural pressure not to show his feelings even when his wife had died, I developed a new empathy with the opposite sex. It also became demonstrably clear over the rest of the scene that Brutus’s grief did indeed cloud his judgment despite his stiff upper lip.
Boys’ Toys
From this moment the play rushes headlong to its conclusion—at least it should rush. In many productions it plods. Scene changes and clunking armour slow the pace, and we sit and watch the swish, thunk, duck, swipe of well-toned, sweating actors grunting in fights to which we probably know the outcome.
We had plenty of athletic, well-toned women in our company, so it wasn’t that we couldn’t have staged these battles traditionally, but most of us switch off in those predictable battle scenes. Phyllida had always known she wanted music to play a large part in the production, so for our first time round in 2012/13* we had a brilliant drummer, an extraordinary Greek electric guitarist with a crimson streak in her hair, a bass guitarist who was also a comedy writer, and my servant Lucius, who was also a boxer and writer and played a mean saxophone.
In preparation for war, the drummer, dressed in combats and shades, sat on a raised movable platform with a single drum and started playing a low and steady drumroll. The rest of the cast raced on with different drums and cymbals and, as they were set up on the platform, the drummer added each sound into the build-up until an entire drum kit was assembled (presumably the prison had authorised the hire). The army then leapt on to the moving platform. Flashing lights and blasting electric guitars were added as it swirled around the space with soldiers falling to their deaths or leaping up to climb up the prison stairway frame. One critic wrote that he had seldom seen so much testosterone on a stage.
Our Clean Break friends pointed out that even for a play the inmates would not be allowed to use anything sharp that could be used as a weapon, so we used what would have been available to us; boys’ toys from the prison nursery unit, i.e water-pistols and plastic machine guns. Put those in the hands of amateur actor/prisoners with the rare excuse to let off steam and we hoped to create an illusion of barely contained danger.
Robert Harris, the historian and novelist, came to talk to us during rehearsals. He endorsed the choice of our prison setting, pointing out that Rome was felt by many to be a prison. The conspirators were desperate and in such a climate they hint at suicide as an escape:
CASSIUS:
That part of tyranny that I do bear
I can shake off at pleasure.
CASCA:
So can I:
So every bondman in his own hand bears
The power to cancel his captivity
All of our prison cast could relate to this, especially Hannah as a lifer with no hope of release. Suicide is a complex issue, and I won’t presume to plumb its depths here. I will just pick out a few strands.
Strand 1
Young women in prison who try to kill themselves because they see themselves as worthless. The world would be better off without them, they think.
Strand 2
Statistically suicide is most common among young men. Grayson Perry again, talking of a thirty-year-old man who had killed himself:
No one had a clue he was suicidal. I think some men don’t even know when they are sad.
Strand 3
It was a Roman soldier’s duty to fall on his sword in the event of defeat or failure. This involved getting someone else to hold that sword.
All these strands plaited together over the last beats of the play. Cassius, mistakenly thinking that Octavius has defeated Brutus (in fact the opposite is true), gets his slave Pindarus to finish him off. When Messala finds his dead body he understands that ‘Mistrust of good success hath done this deed’.
When Brutus finds his dead friend, he knows who to blame:
O Julius Caesar, thou art mighty yet!
Thy spirit walks abroad and turns our swords
In our own proper entrails.
Fear and guilt are eating into their morale and dooming them to lose the war. Is this Shakespeare’s message? That regime change will ultimately fail? Hannah deeply hopes not. I hope Shakespeare is less decided than that and simply wants us to ask questions and learn about ourselves. He has engineered a trick of the plot in order to achieve tragedy, in order to teach us something. Just as Romeo and Juliet could have ended happily if Friar John had been able to get Friar Laurence’s message through to Romeo, Cassius and Brutus might have lived to fight another battle had not Pindarus, on look-out, misread the situation he sees far off in Brutus’s camp. Shakespeare doesn’t alter the historical fact of Cassius’s and Brutus’s deaths, but he imagines them in such a way to make us aware of the ‘it needn’t have been like that’ aspect. Our minds shape our destinies.
The thrash-metal sounds build throughout the last beat of the play, punctuating Brutus’s speeches as he desperately seeks someone who will hold the sword for him to fall on, while he urges his friends to escape the advancing enemy: his last effort to salvage some good from the disaster.
My heart doth joy that yet in all my life
I found no man but he was true to me.
I shall have glory by this losing day
More than Octavius and Mark Antony
By this vile conquest shall attain unto.
At this point I got to be a sort of rock performer in my sixties. Slap in the spotlight, my men dropping all around me, drums thrashing, lights flashing, an electric guitar wailing as Brutus does a kind of desperate dance trying to summon up the guts to shoot himself in the head (…with a water pistol). Finally he gets his servant Lucius (in the original it is one, Strato, whom we barely know) to do the deed. Lucius the boy soldier. Will he take Brutus’s lessons to his heart or is he so brutalised by the war that he joins the winning side? The latter of course.
With Brutus safely dead, Mark Antony can afford a generous eulogy. Our Mark Antony speedily beckons to a ‘camera man’ to make sure it gets filmed for the nation. The PR will do him good. For a second he is the unifier we hoped Brutus would be, but, almost immediately, Octavius sweeps the carpet out from under him and assumes the cloak.
Frankie/Caesar, who has appeared at intermittent moments during the play, as Caesar’s ghost appearing to Brutus on the eve of battle, and then during the battle itself, now sits at the drum-kit orchestrating all of this with single, startling drumbeats. We all move to her tune. I rise up and join the ranks again and then suddenly, just before we reach the end, a deafening blast comes from the prison tannoy: ‘FIVE MINUTES TO LOCK-UP!’
A mixture of fury at being cut off in mid-flow and elation at their achievement runs through the prisoners. The flurry of reaction masks a surprising and shocking costume change. Frankie (ex-Caesar) has dropped her disguise and suddenly we see her dressed in the uniform of the prison officer she has been all along. She orders us into line ready to leave the space.
At this point we shed the Roman layer of the play within the play and were just actors playing prisoners. Each of these prisoners had given her all, had felt empowered by understanding Shakespeare’s language and by having it on her tongue-tip. Now each prisoner was reduced to a number. Phyllida wanted Hannah to be the last to leave. She invited me to take my time, to do something distinct from the others. She wouldn’t define it, and I never planned it. The challenge was to drop the acting and find Hannah’s agony somewhere inside. I thought of Judith Clark. The same age as me, she has been locked away for thirty-five years. Yes, she made mistakes, but the only life she took was her own. Prison brought her time to think and to make a profound turnaround. Why is she still there?
Prison Officer Frankie broke my reverie and hurried me along, and, as the door clanged shut behind the cast, I hoped we had done Julius Caesar justice, but I also hoped that we had left the audience with a sense of the talent we waste when we sideline swathes of society or lock them out of sight.
* At the time of writing we are about to remount the play with a different musical grouping.