So I was planning on going to see Julius Caesar on Thursday evening but I had the directions wrong so I ended up on going on Sunday evening. The play was in the Oxford Community Arts Theater which was a really old historical building. Once there they served cookies at the play, which made me very happy. The first thing that you saw when you went into the room was bright blue walls with a giant blood red sign that announced ROME. Other than that sign there were no set pieces to speak of. The cast came out and they were all dressed in very modern clothes and they had a hint of corporate style (ties, heels, button up shirts ect…) The next thing I noticed was the girl who play Casca, Katherine Hawthorne, was in my other English class (124 Introduction to Fiction.) I had no idea she was into acting and was very excited to be able to see her in class and tell her I went to her production of Julius Caesar.
The actors themselves did very well. They spoke the script well (and we all know that Shakespearean dialect is not easy to master.) They were also very good at acting and were very passionate about the tragedies that occurred in the play. I have seen a few productions of the play, read it, and watched the movie and I have never seen a modern take on it. The artistic value was there to make the story more modern and more applicable to the lives of college students who are probably not Shakespearean scholars. I noticed that many of the words were changed and substituted with more modern words that we have in our vocabulary and in many ways make the story more interesting to understand. An example of this would be after they murdered Caesar they are talking about letting Marc Antony speak at the funeral and they changed the word for pulpit.
I was thrown by the changes they made in the gender roles for the characters. For instance Marc Antony was a female. This was very different than what I am used to because the traditional role of the hero who leads to the defeat of the people who killed his mentor Julius Caesar. It was a cool gender empowering selection and made women a more integral part of the play and was good for the quirkiness of the play.
The play was very different and almost a dumbed down version of the play. I personally appreciated the idea of making changes and giving the play a unique, artistic quality, but I liked the original Julius Caesar as it was and was hoping for something more like that. I was also confused at the lack of setting and props, yet they wore business attire and did not change the rest of the setting. They could have put it in modern Roman times (which I would have loved because I was just there!) As a lover of history and a great admirer of Shakespeare I was slightly disappointed in the changes but applaud the people who participated because they did a great job memorizing the lines and acting because I know they worked hard and should be proud of the performance and I had a lot of fun attending the play and supporting my fellow classmates in something that they are interested in!
Thanks for your response, Kristin. I think I’m most curious about the setting at the moment — it sounds really minimalist. I wonder, from a theater perspective, what the intended effects of that were? Was it a Beckett-esque moment? (Have you seen or read “Waiting for Godot”?)