Where Julius Caesar meets Trump and Boris Johnson...
Icarus Theatre Collective are promising chilling resonances as they embark on their tour of Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar with dates including Portsmouth’s New Theatre Royal on February, February 21-22.
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00:00 Good afternoon, my name is Phil Hewitt, Group Arts, editor of the Sussex Newspapers. Lovely
00:06 this afternoon to be speaking to Max Levendell. Now Max, you're directing Julius Caesar for
00:12 Icarus Theatre Collective and it's coming to parts including Portsmouth and Crawley
00:18 later in the year. And you were saying, somewhat shockingly but very persuasively, Julius Caesar
00:24 has all sorts of very striking parallels with certain recent leaders of our very recent
00:30 memory. Who do you think of? Yeah, it absolutely does. I don't want to get too dry with how
00:37 much fun and comedy and sex and violence there is in this play, but it does have that reference
00:43 to Trump, to Johnson, to Hitler even, and Putin. The similarities between Caesar in
00:52 real life and Caesar in this play are unsettlingly familiar.
00:58 So what is Caesar actually doing that makes us think of our recent leaders?
01:04 Well most of the stuff that he's done is before the play. The play is actually, it's the last
01:11 two days of his life. And actually he's not in over half the play because it's about what
01:17 happens after. But it is some of the stuff that he has done is, you know, he got one
01:25 of the top senators down on his knees in the forum and poured a bucket of excrement over
01:30 his head in public in front of everybody. He kept, you know, he had other senators beaten
01:36 up. He was constantly talking to the people going, "I'm standing for you. I'll take the
01:43 punishments that the Senate gives for you." Whenever he wanted the law passed before he
01:49 became top emperor, when he was like 37, he would, that if he thought the Senate wasn't
01:54 going to go for it, he would go down to the forum and talk to the people and say, "This
01:59 is a law that the Senate doesn't want you to see," and show it to the people and force
02:04 such momentum for what he wanted to happen.
02:06 Is this faking a selflessness that absolutely wasn't there?
02:10 Fake news, everything, his war in, he conquered Gaul. He was a great military leader. He did
02:16 do that, which Gaul is France today, basically. And then he decided to keep going into England.
02:24 And he got slaughtered. I mean, as we all know, nobody could conquer England. And he
02:31 got slaughtered. But he sent his, I think it might have been Mark Antony, actually,
02:35 he sent Mark Antony back to Rome with a report on how brilliantly the battle had gone, saying
02:40 that they scared all the savages of England. And so, you know, there's nothing really there
02:45 to rule. So he decided to come back. It's like, no, they destroyed half your army and
02:51 sent you back, and you fled in your ships back across the Channel. And that's the kind
02:56 of thing.
02:57 Your point is, this is a bit of a warning for the future, isn't it? But Caesar has come
03:02 up, Trump did, briefly, we hope.
03:05 Briefly, we hope. But he's coming back, right? And Caesar came back, too. He got the top
03:11 job in Rome, one of the two consuls at the top of the Senate. And then they indicted
03:17 him, because he was very familiar. And he was facing prosecution. So he decided to go
03:23 lead a war to conquer Gaul for 10 years to avoid this prosecution. And he was a great
03:28 leader, but he was avoiding prosecution. And then he came back. And he was so terrified
03:36 to the senators that they had the choice, do I go against him and possibly get killed?
03:42 Or the, you know, he was, as I said, he was having the senators beaten up, he was humiliating
03:47 them. There were a couple of people that just kind of disappeared. And we don't actually
03:50 know if that was Caesar or not. But the senators were certainly terrified of this. And they
03:56 could, okay, do we placate him? And most of them were selfish, wealthy merchants, who
04:04 went, yeah, we'll just give Caesar a tribute and elect him, literally elected a dictator
04:10 for life. So that he would keep on their side.
04:16 It's fascinating and worryingly persuasive production. Really good to see that, Max.
04:21 Thank you very much indeed for your time.
04:23 No worries. Thank you so much, though.
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