Mark Rylance, the artistic director of the reconstructed Globe, has chosen to present Julius Caesar in 1999, since the play premiered at the original Globe in 1599 with an all-male cast of fifteen. For this quadricentennial production, Rylance has again used fifteen actors (14 Brits and one American) and only men (no big deal, since there are but two minor female parts). The audience of groundlings serves as the Roman populace.
There are some curious features: the show opens with a parade of near-naked men wearing furs, after which the costumes mix Elizabethan dress, togas and (for the nameless citizens) sneakers, jeans, and reversed baseball caps; and in Act 4 a poet sings a bit of "Danny Boy." But in general, Rylance has staged the play effectively, with Giles Block overseeing the elocution. Props are minimal but suggestive: Act I has two white statues in the gallery; Act II has a bench and six potted trees; a large statue of Caesar is rolled in for the assassination in the Senate; Act IV makes do with three stools and a map on a pole; in Act V there are banners emblazoned with the famous SPQR Latin abbreviation.
The best performance comes from Richard Bremmer as Cassius, truly "lean and hungry" as Caesar describes him, a man given to loud and vehement speech. Balancing him nicely is his intellectual brother-in-law Brutus, imbued by black actor Danny Sapani with considerable mellowness and, at times, even sweetness. Brutus' speech to the citizenry about the dead Caesar is superbly spoken from the gallery. As Mark Antony, Mark Lewis Jones begins his funeral oration in the gallery, then descends to the front edge of the stage to show the populace the cuts in Caesar's bloody mantle, and finally sits on the coffin edge to read the will. This is all fine, except that Jones' delivery is inferior to Sapani's just-concluded harangue, so that Antony does not properly trump Brutus as the playwright intended. Otherwise, Rylance and his charges provide a solid enactment of Shakespeare's powerful political play.
