Beware the Ides of March (Barbican Arts Centre in general)

Member Name: hogsflesh

Product:	Barbican Arts Centre in general
Date:	18/04/05 (183 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Some top-notch Shakespeare, action with good acting and, excellent staging

Disadvantages: The Barbican is, confusing, badly laid out, and rather ugly

The Barbican’s an enormous concrete housing estate on the Eastern edge of the City of London. Built as part of the redevelopment of the area after the Blitz, it’s either an unpleasant concrete monstrosity or a charming example of Sixties utopian architecture, depending on your point of view. Ridiculously labyrinthine, it’s almost impossible to find one’s way around the Barbican as its signage is esoteric and its entrances and exits often seem to lack any kind of logic. It has its own tube stop (on the Metropolitan and Hammersmith and City Lines), and is also easily accessed from Moorgate (Northern Line, Bank branch) and served by many, many bus routes.

If you persevere, and learn to find your way around, there are good things at the Barbican. The Museum of London is pretty cool (especially since it’s free again). The flats, while generally too small and too expensive, do offer good views. And then there’s the Barbican Centre. It contains an art gallery, a couple of cinemas and a concert hall, among other things, but the main attraction for me has always been the theatre. The main stage at the Barbican is one of the biggest in London. The Barbican used to be the Royal Shakespeare Company’s London base (and I believe it will be again soon, as the RSC’s quixotic attempts to wow the West End with obscure Jacobean tragedies and Golden Age Spanish comedies haven’t done nearly as well as they were presumably expected to).

At the moment, the Barbican’s staging an epic production of Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar (which is what I’m actually reviewing here). The play is well known, so I don’t need to tell you the plot in any great detail. Set in Ancient Rome, it concerns the murder of Julius Caesar and the vicious power politics that follow his death. The main focus is on the chief conspirators, the honourable Brutus and the ambitious Cassius, and their struggle with Mark Antony, Caesar’s right-hand man, who leads the efforts to hunt them down.

Directed by Deborah Warner, who’s worked at the RSC to huge acclaim, it’s a very effective production. I had misgivings to begin with (modern dress interpretations of Shakespeare don’t always work, and directors sometimes go a bit too far in putting their own stamp on a play), but this works very well for the most part. The full depth of the enormous stage is used very effectively, with huge marble steps being the only scenery worth mentioning. The crowd scenes are done really well, with a mob of what looked like about 100 people milling around on stage. (Shakespeare’s pessimistic view of the collective intelligence of people seems astoundingly modern, especially with a general election looming.)

The play does unravel a bit towards the end, but that’s mostly Shakespeare’s fault, with the audience effectively having to sit through the same emotional climax twice. The battle scenes at the end are perhaps too stylised (and too loud) – and dressing everyone in desert combat uniforms is a bit tacky. Julius Caesar is a great play with a lot to say to us about politics and stupidity and ambition – it doesn’t need to have unsubtle references to the Gulf war thrown in to make it ‘relevant’. But the direction is generally very good, with some very effective touches, and the lighting, music and so on all work well. The only real miscalculation is having water pouring onto the stage during the storm scene, imitating rain quite convincingly. The problem is that it’s needlessly distracting and you can’t really hear what the actors are saying.

However well directed it is, I suspect that the main attraction for most people will be the cast. Simon Russell Beale as Cassius is good, as he always is – a very intelligent and beautifully-spoken performance, if a little typical. Anton Lesser is superb as Brutus, the one genuinely decent man in the play, convincingly despairing. Ralph Fiennes, as Antony, is probably the best of the stars, producing a much better performance than I’d expected. He’s restored my faith in him as a stage actor, and he does the ‘Friends, Romans, Countrymen’ bit very well. His resemblance to Leonard Rossiter in Rising Damp, especially in the first scene after the interval, is rather distracting, but on the whole he makes you forget that.

The rest of the cast features some surprisingly good actors in some pretty rotten little parts. John Shrapnel is good as Caesar, a hard-nosed modern politician, creating a memorable character out of his few scenes. It’s quite a surprise to see a leading actress of the stature of Fiona Shaw playing Portia, a distinctly minor character. She does it well, although it does seem that she’s straining to make it interesting by limping and slightly slurring her words. The rest of the cast are more than up to their roles, with the possible exception of Octavius, who didn’t seem quite as confident as the others (I can’t remember the actor’s name, I’m afraid; I didn’t buy a programme).

My only real complaint is an entirely trivial one – I had a shocking hangover when I saw it, and the general loudness of the play was often painfully overpowering in my weakened condition. What I needed was a gentle aesthetic experience, like watching two girls sitting in a sunny meadow, softly kissing each other. What I got was more like a knight in armour throwing alarm clocks at a tap-dancing midget. Not a bad thing, and something I’d have positively revelled in had I been of sounder mind, but just slightly overwhelming in my ruined state. So I guess the moral there is, don’t get horribly drunk the night before you go to the theatre. On the whole, though, this is one of the best Shakespeares I’ve seen for a while, being a satisfyingly intelligent production which doesn’t drown the story in self-consciously clever nonsense, and very strongly acted.

The Barbican theatre is, as I said, very big. We were sitting in the Circle, which affords a pretty good view of the stage, and you’re just about close enough to see facial expressions properly. There’s not a huge amount of leg room, although it is a lot better than some places; if you’re on the front row, as I was, you can put your feet up on the railing thing in front of you and idly daydream about kicking off your shoes onto the heads of the people in the more expensive seats below. The seat prices range from £10 to £35-ish. It might well be that this has sold out already – it’s only on until 14th May, after which it will apparently tour Europe – but if you can get tickets then you really should (obviously not if you hate Shakespeare, that would be foolish). The play is three and a half hours long (including half-hour interval), and doesn’t finish until 11.15, so it does require a certain amount of commitment (it never feels like it drags, but it does require stamina).

There are plenty of places in the Barbican where you can buy coffee or beer or whatever before the play, or during the interval, and a decent enough café overlooking a big lake thing. Programmes can be purchased for £4. There’s also a gift shop, which apparently contains ‘Julius Caesar merchandise’ – that was actually announced on the tannoy as the interval started, provoking derisive laughter from pretty much everyone, and I wasn’t tempted to look at what was on offer. The Barbican is one of the strangest public spaces in London (and not in a good way), but the theatre is worth a visit, and you could do a lot worse than Julius Caesar.

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