Julius Caesar

This is a very slow but enjoyable and faithful version of Julius Caesar. It feels a bit 'sword and sandals' thanks to the now old and low budget TV production. But its focus is on faithfulness to the text and that it is. Richard Pasco is a brilliant Brutus, you totally feel along with him the battle in his conscience and what is right and wrong in the brutal world that he lives in. For a more modern and engaging version watch the National Theatre's 2018 version if you can get hold of it.

William Shakespeare's classic tragedy, Julius Caesar, has always been one of his lesser liked plays. It's predominantly an all male drama with only two supporting female characters like Calpurnia and Portia. It was still a male dominated world in Caesar's time where women are wives, nurses, maids, and mistresses. The BBC did a service in producing Shakespeare's plays faithfully to the word. I watch the English subtitles to get a better account of the story. The BBC has faithfully recreated the background scenes without much cost. There is no audience for a reaction or applause. The cast includes Charles in the title role. He is a fine Caesar. Richard Pasco and Keith Michell are also fine too. Unlike Shakespeare's other tragedies, this story is about politics, power, corruption, and greed.

This production of Julius Caesar was directed by Herbert Wise. It was his first and only contribution to the BBC Shakespeare series, and he was undoubtedly offered the job because of his superlative work directing the series "I Claudius." (Be sure also to track down his "The Woman in Black," a case study of how to scare the stuffing out of the audience with zero 'yuk' factor.)

Shakespeare makes different demands than Robert Graves or Nigel Kneale, however, and the director gives us a production more tailored to the strengths and weaknesses of the television medium than most in the series. Only here do we get gigantic closeups of the actors' faces, which are sometimes not sufficiently photogenic for such intense scrutiny. On one of today's large-screen televisions, the effect can be overwhelming. Also, the soliloquies are almost all voice over on the soundtrack accompanying the face of a closed-mouth actor, with actual speech only on certain key passages. Either you find it more psychologically valid, or totally disruptive.

Thanks to Herbert Wise, the general interplay of emotion is considerably more precise than in many others of the BBC Shakespeare series. People talk, listen, act, react, think in the most detailed way, and the pace is always just. Though the political aspect of the drama is given its due, the emphasis here is on the interpersonal relationships.

The director is on record as saying that Shakespeare and television make a bad fit, and that no one up to this time has "cracked it." We can argue among ourselves whether he was right or not, but this show is different from all the others, and well worth watching.

Richard Pasco, Charles Gray, Keith Michell and Virginia McKenna all turn in well-rounded performances. Elizabeth Spriggs surprises as a warm and mobile Calpurnia. given her chatty Mistress Quickly in "Merry Wives," and memorable turns in TV adaptations of "Middlemarch," "Martin Chuzzlewit" and "Sense and Sensibility." David Collings' Cassius starts out lean and hungry, but goes mushy and hysterical a little early.

The play itself usually runs out of steam after Antony's oration, and here it is less of a problem than usual. The physical production by Tony Abbott is good, providing a more spacious Rome than that of the Coriolanus broadcast, and a somewhat flowery battlefield.

However, for those in search of an alternative, find on the Internet the audiocassette of the Caedmon Shakespeare Recording Society version of a generation earlier. Anthony Quayle is the Brutus, John Mills the Cassius, Alan Bates the Mark Antony and Sir Ralph Richardson as Julius Caesar. Even without visuals, everyone is one size larger, and I for one appreciate it.

The sets and the crowd scenes are generally well handled, but they are not what elicit a rating of 9 stars from me. Rather, the quality of the acting is what makes this production of "Julius Caesar" so commendable.

Richard Pasco is especially powerful as Brutus, with a performance that goes astray in only a couple of small respects. Near the end of Act IV, Pasco as Brutus is too rough and imperious in his interaction with Claudius and Varro; the text of the play suggests to me that Brutus was being solicitous rather than overbearing in his instructions to those subordinates. In addition, the death of Brutus was not quite as persuasively staged as the death of Cassius. Still, those two minor blemishes do not detract from a performance that splendidly captures the depths of one of Shakespeare's most complicated characters.

Having mentioned Cassius, I should straightaway commend David Collings for an excellent performance that captures the nuances of the character. Collings is certainly high-strung at times, but he is thereby conveying accurately the personality of Cassius as Shakespeare depicts it. From beginning to end, Collings combines subtlety and energy in a memorable display of fine acting.

Sam Dastor is engagingly witty in his portrayal of Casca (a character who disappears from the play after the assassination of Caesar), and Alexander Davion is adept as Decius Brutus whose expostulations with Caesar play a small but pivotal part in the unfolding of the play's events.

Keith Michell is generally impressive as Marc Antony. He begins in the mode of an Australian playboy who then rapidly matures into the desolate follower of a murdered master. His delivery of the "Friends, Romans, countrymen" oration is deft, and his performance in the second half of the play captures well both the valor and the arrogance of Antony. My one criticism is that the voice-over of the "O, pardon me, thou bleeding piece of earth" soliloquy does not work well. Though voice-overs are elsewhere used to good effect in this production, the soliloquy just mentioned should have been spoken throughout. During the voice-over, Michell looks as though he is bursting to speak (indeed, to yell), and he should have been given free rein to do so.

Virginia McKenna is excellent as Portia, whose voice-overs are especially effective. Elizabeth Spriggs is a fine Calpurnia, whose glowering at Decius Brutus is both funny and poignant.

The only lackluster performance is that of Leonard Preston in the minor role of Titinius. An actor playing that role should appear distraught in the aftermath of the death of Cassius, but instead Preston seems largely unmoved and even slightly jocund. Titinius is the only character who commits suicide unassistedly. Preston does not convey the frame of mind that would lead someone to such a desperate tack.

Despite some minor flaws, this production is admirable in multiple respects -- not least in its retention of nearly the full text. I heartily recommend it.

Unlike the movies, this is a full version of the play, clocking in at a little under three hours. In performing the whole play, we see that Julius Caesar is one of Shakespeare's best plays- not simply for the masterful rhetoric but for the characterisation. There are shades of Iago in the manipulative Cassius, eaten away by jealousy, and Brutus is a mixture of Macbeth and proto-Hamlet.

The BBC Complete Shakespeare series has been criticised for over-reverence to the text, emphasising educational value over dramatic value, and for its low budget productions. However, by presenting the full play, or at least, as full a version of the play than you are ever likely to get, they show subtleties and ambiguities that aren't present in streamlined versions.

This production's strength is that it does not offer us the big tragic hero. Initially, it looked as if Richard Pasco was going to play Brutus as the typical bland noble hero. However, once Brutus does the deed, Pasco presents him as a lonely man with a lot of power but the inability to do anything with it. This adds a wonderful irony to Brutus' earlier soliloquy musing on the extent of Caesar's ambition.

David Collings initially presents us with a villainous ambitious Cassius, but then Cassius slowly becomes a tragic figure, who does what he does out of love and admiration for Brutus. Admittedly it does come across as a bit stereotypically homosexual at times, but it is interesting to see Cassius as ultimately a good guy.

Charles Grey is a very toad-like Julius Caesar. Initially I disliked his performance; Caesar has generally been presented as a feeble man with a God-delusion. Grey's Caesar is very much a man of the people. He represents popular politics that are based around personalities (much like today's politics), which helped to contrast with Brutus' archaic concepts of honour. Keith Michell as Marc Antony also showed that he belonged to the school of politics that appeals to emotions rather than honour. Antony is probably the closest thing the play has to a hero, and even he looks villainous at one point, as he orders the death of his nephew.

I would urge people who think they know the play to watch this production, look past the skimpy togas, and discover a play rich in themes and characters. Julius Caesar is an eternally relevant play, more so than any other Shakespeare play.