I have seen more than a dozen productions of Shakespeare plays, live or on film. I’ve read several of his plays FOR FUN. Pretty good for a gal from rural Western Kentucky. Thanks to public school teachers in the Henderson County, Kentucky school system, I was introduced to a Shakespeare play in junior high school and every year after. And thanks to minoring in theater at Western Kentucky University – a minor the university will get betting rid of – my exposure to and enjoyment of the Bard continued through college. And continues to this day.
I love me some Shakespeare.
Shakespeare makes me laugh. He makes me cry. He makes me feel romantic. He reminds me of the wonder I’ve experienced. And the gut-wrenching sadness. He brings up topics that are buried far down in my soul, that I hope no one discovers. He’s full of lofty ideas… and sex and lots of dirty jokes. He’s painfully sexist and, at times, shockingly feminist. His plays are full of history and, yet, are so very timeless.
I love me some Shakespeare.
When staged, I enjoy Shakespeare plays in Elizabethan costumes, I enjoy them re-imagined in a banana republic, I enjoy women playing traditionally male parts, I enjoy the same person playing multiple parts – as long as a staged production is emotionally sincere and honest to the text, I’m good.
But I’m not always happy with productions – sometimes, the gimmicks to update the play, to make it feel fresh, can be too much, can get too contrived and feel too much like a distracting stunt – and not at all necessary.
With all that in mind, and with great trepidation, I started watching a production of Julius Caesar, set in a women’s prison, as though the women prisoners are putting on the play in their prison – so it’s a play within a play. I was fearing too much of a gimmick. 15 minutes in, I was completely sold on the idea, and by the time it ended, I wanted to stand up in my living room and applaud to the television and scream “Brava.” At one point while watching I had to hit pause and just cry and think about what I was seeing and experiencing. There were moments I sat here in my living room, on my couch, hands over my mouth, trembling, full of every bit of the emotion I had as I watched Avenger’s: End Game a couple of weeks ago. The conceptual brilliance of Phyllida Lloyd’s direction and staging and the mind-blowing performance by Harriet Walter as Brutus makes this, for me, THE definitive production of Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar. It makes me want to go get a teaching degree just to show this to high school students in an English class. I feel like my life has been forever altered after viewing this production – seriously.
Yeah, I liked it.
If I ever meet Harriet Walter or Phyllida Lloyd, I will probably throw myself at their feet and scream “I’M NOT WORTHY TO BE IN YOUR PRESENCE.”
This production was shown on PBS via Great Performances. I knew NOTHING about it before I recorded it and watched it. Since then, I’ve delved into the Interwebs to find out how this brilliance came to be. The setting for this production was inspired by a creative collaboration between prisoners, actors and the production team in association with the theater company Clean Break and the York St. John University Prison Partnership Project in England. I have never seen a production so well filmed, and as it’s in the round, I was even further blown away. Turns out that the production was filmed on two consecutive Saturdays – one week with eight cameras on one side, the next with the cameras on the opposite side. The resulting footage was edited together over several months, together with material from GoPro cameras the actors wear at different times. The “NT Live” model of capture, with fixed cameras, would have been utterly unsatisfactory for this production.
Any viewing of Julius Caesar is particularly poignant in the USA right now: it is the acknowledgment of the fears of a dictatorship tempered with a caution about bloody revolution. I appreciate that timeless message very much – that’s one of the reasons I wanted to see this, even though I’ve seen Julius Caesar at least twice before. I just wasn’t expecting a production that was utterly mesmerizing and genius.
I’m so glad I give every month to OPB. The importance of public television and public radio cannot be denied.
I blogged about my introduction to Shakespeare, in case you are interested.
Leave a Reply