"Who Can Play the King? A Casting Debate Goes Beyond Color."

by Marc Tracy 

[Three productions this summer of William Shakespeare’s Richard III took different approaches to the title role:  Colm Feore appeared at the Stratford Festival in Stratford, Ontario, Canada; Danai Gurira at the Public Theater’s Free Shakespeare in the Park in New York City; and Arthur Hughes at the Royal Shakespeare Company in Stratford-upon-Avon, England.

[Feore plays Richard at Stratford, Ontario, at the Tom Patterson Theatre from 10 May through 30 October; Gurira’s performance ran at the Delacorte Theater in Central Park from 21 June to 17 July; and the RSC production with Hughes runs in the Royal Shakespeare Theatre from 23 June to 8 October.

[Marc Tracy’s article appeared in the New York Times of 28 July 2022 in the news (front) section.]

Should Shakespeare’s Richard III be reserved for disabled actors? Does the character have to be played by a white man? By a man at all? Three recent productions took different tacks.

When three of the most prestigious Shakespeare companies in the world staged “Richard III” this summer, each took a different approach to casting its scheming title character in ways that illuminate the fraught debate over which actors should play which roles.

At the Royal Shakespeare Company in Stratford-upon-Avon, England, Richard was played by the actor Arthur Hughes, who has radial dysplasia, which means he has a shorter right arm and a missing thumb. The company said it was the first time it had cast a disabled actor to play the character, who describes himself in the opening scene as “deformed.” The production’s director, Gregory Doran, who was until recently the Royal Shakespeare’s artistic director, told The Times of London earlier this year that having actors pretend to be disabled to play “Richard III” would “probably not be acceptable” these days [David Sanderson and Dominic Maxwell, “RSC chief Gregory Doran: Able-bodied actors cannot be Richard III,” 6 May 2022].

The Stratford Festival in Ontario, Canada, took a different tack: It cast Colm Feore, who is not disabled, to play a Richard who has a deformed spine but who is not a hunchback. And in New York City, the Public Theater’s Free Shakespeare in the Park went in yet another direction, casting Danai Gurira, a Black woman who does not have a disability, as the duke who schemes and kills his way to the throne of England.

Their varying approaches came at a moment when an intense rethinking of the cultural norms around identity, representation, diversity, opportunity, imagination and artistic license have led to impassioned debates, and battles, over casting.

It has been decades since major theaters have had white actors play Othello in blackface, and, after years of criticism, performances by white actors playing caricatured Asian roles are growing rarer in theater and film, and are being rethought in opera and ballet.

Now there are questions about who should play gay characters (Tom Hanks recently told The New York Times Magazine [David Marchese, “The Reflections of Tom Hanks,” 19 June 2022] that today he would, rightly, not be cast as a gay attorney dying of AIDS, as he was in his Academy Award-winning role in the 1993 film “Philadelphia”) or transgender characters (Eddie Redmayne said last year that it had been a “mistake” to play a trans character in 2015’s “The Danish Girl” [Kirsty Lang. “Eddie Redmayne’s Cabaret gamble,” Sunday Times [London] 21 Nov. 2021; quoted in many other publications, both online and print]) or characters of different ethnicities and religions. (Bradley Cooper faced criticism this year for using a prosthetic nose to play the Jewish conductor Leonard Bernstein in a forthcoming biopic [Maestro, co-written and directed by Cooper for Amblin Entertainment and Netflix; set to be released by Netflix in fall 2023].)

While many celebrate the move away from old, sometimes stereotyped portrayals and the new opportunities belatedly being given to actors from a diverse array of backgrounds, others worry that the current insistence on literalism and authenticity can be too constraining. Acting, after all, is the art of pretending to be someone you are not.

“The essential nature of art is freedom,” said the Oscar-winning actor F. Murray Abraham, whose many credits include Shylock, the Jewish moneylender of Shakespeare’s “The Merchant of Venice,” though Mr. Abraham is not Jewish. [I saw Abraham as Shylock in Shakespeare’s Merchant at Theatre for a New Audience in rep with Barabas in Marlowe’s The Jew of Malta in March 2007; he reprised the Shylock in 2011.  See my report on Merchant on Rick On Theater on 28 February 2011.  ~Rick] “Once we impose any kind of control over it, it’s no longer free.”

And while the recent insistence on more authentic casting promises greater diversity in some respects, it threatens less in others — coming as many women and actors of color are getting more opportunities to play some of the greatest, meatiest roles in the repertory, regardless of whatever race or gender or background the playwrights may have initially envisioned.

Sometimes such casting is considered “colorblind,” in which case audiences are asked to look beyond an actor’s race or ethnicity, or other features. But in recent years the trend has been toward “color-conscious” casting, in which an actor’s race, ethnicity or identity becomes part of the production, and a feature of the character being portrayed.

Some of the varied approaches were underscored by this summer’s productions of “Richard III,” and the different directions each theater took when choosing an actor to play Richard.

Richard tells the audience in the opening scene that he is:

Deformed, unfinish’d, sent before my time
Into this breathing world, scarce half made up,
And that so lamely and unfashionable
That dogs bark at me as I halt by them [Duke of Gloucester; Act I, Scene 1] 

The remark by Mr. Doran, the director of the Royal Shakespeare Company production, that it would “probably not be acceptable” these days to have actors pretend to be disabled to play Richard caused a stir in theater circles.

Not only is Mr. Doran a renowned Shakespearean, but his husband, Antony Sher, who died last year, was one of the most memorable Richards of recent decades, using crutches in an acclaimed 1984 production and writing a book about his portrayal [Year of the King (Limelight Editions, 1987)].

Mr. Doran, whose production in Stratford-upon-Avon was critically lauded, later clarified his thinking about its casting, explaining that while any actor might be a successful Richard, he believed the role should be reserved for disabled actors until they “have the opportunities across the board now more widely afforded to other actors.”

The new staging in Stratford, Ontario, featuring Mr. Feore, listed a “disability consultant” in its credits. His depiction was inspired by the discovery of Richard’s bones nearly a decade ago — the skeleton suggested a form of scoliosis — and rested on the idea that his physique “was less of a medical disability than a social and cultural one,” the company’s spokeswoman, Ann Swerdfager, said in an email. [Richard III’s remains were tentatively discovered in Leicester, England, on 7 September 2012 and confirmed on 4 February 2013. The remains were reburied in Leicester Cathedral on 26 March.] The critic Karen Fricker wrote in The Toronto Star: “As much as I admired Feore’s performance, it did lead me to wonder if this will be the last able-bodied actor making a star turn as a disabled character on the Stratford stage, given crucial conversations currently happening around deaf and disability performance.”

And in New York, Ms. Gurira, who has appeared in “Black Panther” and the television series “The Walking Dead,” tried to explore the underlying reasons for Richard’s behavior. “There is a psychological reason for what he becomes,” she said in an interview. “He’s looking at the rules in front of him, and he feels he’s most capable, but the rules disallow him from manifesting his full capability.”

The production’s director, Robert O’Hara, said that they made Richard’s difference key to the interpretation. “Richard’s otherness becomes an entire reason for his behavior,” he said in an interview. “He feels like now he has to play a part people projected onto him.”

The rest of the cast for the production, which ended its run earlier this month, was notably diverse, and included several actors with disabilities in roles that are not usually cast that way. Ali Stroker, a Tony-winning actress who uses a wheelchair, played Lady Anne; Monique Holt, who is Deaf, played Richard’s mother, the two typically communicating onstage via American Sign Language.

“I wanted to open up the conversation from ‘Why isn’t Richard being played by a disabled actor?’ to ‘Why isn’t every role considered able to be played by a disabled actor?’” Mr. O’Hara said.

Ayanna Thompson, a professor of English at Arizona State University and a Shakespeare scholar in residence at the Public Theater who consulted on its “Richard III,” argued that the growing embrace of color-conscious casting reflected contemporary understandings of how different attributes inflect both actors’ identities and audiences’ perceptions.

“All of our bodies carry meaning on stage, whether or not we want to acknowledge that. And that’s going to affect storytelling,” Ms. Thompson said.

She pointed to an example from another play: Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, friends of Hamlet’s, whom other characters often confuse for each other. “If Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are played by Black actors and the Hamlet family is all-white,” she said, “the inability to distinguish carries a whole set of different meanings.”

Many productions upend traditional casting to interrogate classics. Women played every role in a trilogy of acclaimed Shakespeare productions directed by Phyllida Lloyd at Donmar Warehouse in London, seen in New York at St. Ann’s Warehouse. A “Julius Caesar” directed by Mr. Doran reset the scene from ancient Rome to modern Africa. Even Hollywood has reimagined some blockbusters, as with the gender-swapped 2016 “Ghostbusters.”

[I saw a Donmar Warehouse’s mounting of an all-female Julius Caesar at St. Ann’s in October 2013.  Directed by Lloyd, it was set in a women’s prison, not Africa; my report on the production was posted on 15 October 2013. 

[(In April 2012, the Royal Shakespeare Company brought a production of Julius Caesar, which director Gregory Doran relocated to contemporary Africa with an all-black cast, to the Brooklyn Academy of Music.  Times writer Marc Tracy may have his JC productions mixed up.)

[I’ve written on ROT on “Non-Traditional Casting”; see my post on 20 December 2009.  ~Rick]

But as there is a push for greater casting freedoms in some areas, there is an argument for more literalism in others, especially from actors with certain backgrounds who lack opportunities.

Some disabled actors are upset when they see Richard III, one of the juiciest disabled characters in the canon, go to someone else. “We all want a level playing field where everybody can play everybody,” said Mat Fraser, an English actor who is disabled and has played Richard, “but my entire career I’ve not been allowed to play hardly anybody.”

In 2016, while accepting an Emmy for his turn as a transgender character in “Transparent,” Jeffrey Tambor said that he hoped to be “the last cisgender male to play a transgender female.” Now, with a “Transparent” stage musical being created in Los Angeles, its creator, Joey Soloway, vowed in an interview: “No trans person should be played by a cis person. Zero tolerance.”

The conversation on casting has been evolving in recent years.

“It used to be that part of the measurement of greatness was your ability to transform yourself,” said Isaac Butler, the author of “The Method: How the Twentieth Century Learned to Act,” a new history of Method acting. “Is versatility still the hallmark of good acting? And how do you approach it if there are certain identity lines you cannot cross? And which are those identity lines?”

[Kirk Woodward, a frequent contributor to this blog, wrote “The Method – a Review,” posted on ROT on 12 March 2022, on Butler’s book.  ~Rick]

Gregg Mozgala, an actor with cerebral palsy, has played roles that are not traditionally portrayed as disabled, as he did playing two monarchs in “Richard III” in New York [Edward IV (Richard III’s predecessor) and the Earl of Richmond (later Henry VII, Richard’s successor)], and sometimes plays characters written as having cerebral palsy, as he will this fall in a Broadway production of the Pulitzer Prize-winning play “Cost of Living.” 

[Cost of Living by Martyna Majok premièred in 2016 at the Williamstown Theatre Festival in Williamstown, Massachusetts.  Produced by the Manhattan Theatre Club, it ran Off-Broadway at New York City Center from 2017 to 2018, winning the 2018 Lucille Lortel Award for Outstanding Play.  In addition to winning the Pulitzer, the play was also nominated for the 2018 Outer Critics Circle Award.

[Mozgala won the 2018 Lucille Lortel Award for Outstanding Featured Actor in a Play for his performance as John, a brilliant and witty doctoral student, and was nominated for the Drama Desk and the Outer Critics Circle Awards.  He’s expected to move with the production for his Broadway debut when Cost of Living opens at MTC’s Samuel J. Friedman Theatre on 3 October.]

“I spent years trying to pretend my disability didn’t exist in life and onstage, which is ridiculous, because it does,” Mr. Mozgala said.

“Every character I ever play is going to have cerebral palsy — there’s nothing I can do about that,” he added. “I have to bring my full humanity to every character I play.”

Some still hold out hope for a day when identity will recede in the conversation.

“A hundred years from now, do I hope white actors could play Othello?” said Oskar Eustis, the Public Theater’s artistic director. “Sure, because it would mean racism wasn’t the explosive issue it is now.”

[The casting decisions made by the three Shakespearean directors—Gregory Doran at the RSC, Antoni Cimolino at the Stratford Festival, and Robert O’Hara for Shakespeare in the Park—touch on non-traditional casting, but the emphasis on literalism and authenticity looks as if it impedes the broader access that non-traditional casting is supposed to afford directors, producers, and actors.

[“Non-traditional casting” is the Actors’ Equity name for its policy of encouraging producers and directors to consider women, minorities, and the handicapped for roles that don’t specifically require them, but also don’t specifically exclude them.  The idea is to give underrepresented actors chances at roles they might not otherwise get.

[But if only a Jewish actor can play Leonard Bernstein—one of the complaints leveled against Bradley Cooper and Maestro—or only a disabled one can be cast as Richard III or Laura Wingfield in Tennessee Williams’s Glass Menagerie, then part of the rationale for non-traditional casting is lost.

[The casting choices the directors made, as Marc Tracy observes, are each “a different approach” with respect to non-traditional casting.  Placing Colm Feore in the role of the last Plantagenet king is traditional casting.  He’s a white male actor with no disability.  (His and Cimolino’s interpretation of Richard’s disability may be less traditional, based, as it is on the examination of the king’s recently-discovered remains, but it’s not unknown, even before 2012.)

[Casting Danai Gurira in the part at the Delacorte is a classic non-trad choice: she’s African American and female, not the conventional choice, though she “acted” Richard’s disability.  Director O’Hara engaged in color-blind and gender-blind casting for the title character in his production; this depends for its success on the talent of the actors and the receptiveness of the spectator to the world of the play established by the production.  This kind of casting can add a wonderful new dimension to a production, as well as provide a terrific performance that otherwise wouldn’t have been possible.  

[The choice of Arthur Hughes at RSC, though, is in the realm of the new drive for literalness and authenticity in casting.  Now, I don’t actually know how Doran ended up putting Hughes, an actor with a disability, into the role of Richard—he may have selected Hughes from the pool of candidates because he was the best choice for the production or he may even have developed the production of Richard III around Hughes in a part he felt the actor was destined to play—but if the director went into the casting process with a litmus test, he eliminated actors the same way earlier directors did when they dismissed disabled actors or other non-traditional choices.

[Now, don’t misunderstand me: I understand and applaud the impulse to cast disabled actors, trans actors, Jewish and Muslim actors, and others as disabled, trans, Jewish, or Muslim characters.  At the same time, though, I understand F. Murray Abraham when he points out, “Once we impose any kind of control over [casting], it’s no longer free.” 

[There’s an inherent conflict, perhaps irreconcilable, between non-traditional casting and “color-conscious” casting.  “Acting, after all,” asserts Tracy, “is the art of pretending to be someone you are not.”  I trained as an actor, and I believe that, too.

[Maybe the friction between the two views on casting will eventually be worked out and some equitable path through the thicket will be found.  But maybe not, and those in the casting business who are proponents of an open non-trad system, and those who advocate a color-, gender-, and ability-conscious system will always clash.

[The first practice results in actors like Robert David Hall, a double-amputee who played the medical examiner on TV’s CSI (2000-2015), and the late Clark Middleton, afflicted with crippling juvenile rheumatoid arthritis, who played recurring roles on Law and Order (1997-2000) and The Blacklist (2014-2020).  The second gives us performances like Cole Sibus (Stumptown) and Chris Burke (Life Goes On), actors with Down syndrome who both played characters with the condition on TV; Gregg Mozgala as John, a character with cerebral palsy, in Cost of Living; and Madison Ferris, who suffers from muscular dystrophy and is confined to a wheelchair, as Laura, a disabled character, in Glass Menagerie.

[Marc Tracy is a reporter on the Culture desk of the New York Times.  He covers debates over representation, appropriation, and politics in the arts.]

'Cloud Nine'

While I was watching Caryl Churchill’s Cloud Nine, I began to try to imagine what it would have been like to see it in 1981 (when it débuted here) or even ’79 (when it premièred in London).  It’s an artifact of its time (Thatcherite Britain principally, but also Reaganite America) but it still speaks to us today, 36 years after it first appeared on a stage.  But let me back up a bit.

In the same conversation my theater partner Diana and I had some months back about upcoming theater events to consider (I explained this in the Quare Land report of 16 October), I told her that the Atlantic Theater Company was reviving Churchill’s best-known play in the fall.  I’d never seen it and I thought Diana, who had originally contacted me back in the mid-’80s to ask me to be her Beatrice to the less prominent theater in New York, ought to see it if she hadn’t as well.  It was, at least, a chance to catch up on some contemporary theater history.  I myself hadn’t seen much Churchill, only Mad Forest in 1992, The Skriker in 1996, and Blue Heart in 1999, and Cloud Nine is a play that’s still talked about.  So I booked seats and we met at the Linda Gross Theater, ATC’s Chelsea home, for the 8 p.m. performance on Friday, 16 October, for what turned out to be a truly fascinating theater experience (despite a physically uncomfortable seating construct—more about which later).  ATC’s revival started previews on 16 September and opened on 5 October; the production’s scheduled closing date is 1 November. 

The London and world première of Cloud 9 (as it was then billed), produced by the Joint Stock Theatre Group, a troupe of young actors launched by Max Stafford-Clark, was on 27 March 1979 under Stafford-Clarke’s direction at the Royal Court Theatre Downstairs.  Previously, Churchill and Stafford-Clark workshopped the play with JSTG on tour starting 14 February 1979 at Dartington College of the Arts in Devon, England.  (In 1980, Churchill and Stafford-Clark revived the play, with a revised script and a different cast, at the Royal Court.)  The play came to New York for its U.S. première in an again-minimally revised version at the Theatre de Lys in Greenwich Village (renamed the Lucille Lortel Theatre in November ’81) from 18 May 1981 to 4 September 1983.  The production ran for 971 performances under the direction of Tommy Tune and won the 1982 Obie Award for Playwriting for Churchill.  There was a short-lived New York revival directed by Michael Rego at the Perry Street Theatre in the West Village from 3 November 1993 to 13 March 1994, but since then, despite the play’s popularity with rep companies and university theaters around the country, it hasn’t had a New York City return until now.

Caryl Churchill was born in 1938 in London.  Though her family moved to Montreal when Churchill was 10, she returned to England for university at Oxford (1957; B.A. in English lit) and remained there.  Churchill began playwriting at university as well; her earliest plays in the ’50s and ’60s were performed at Oxford-based theater troupes.  She took up radio drama and teleplays in the ’60s and ’70s in order to raise a family (Churchill’s married to a lawyer and they have three sons), until in 1972, she wrote her first major stage play, Owners, which was staged at the Royal Court in London.  In 1974, Churchill became Resident Dramatist at the Royal Court for a year and in the late 1970s into the1980s, wrote for several theater companies, including Max Stafford-Clark’s JSTG and the feminist collective, Monstrous Regiment.  1979’s Cloud 9, only Churchill’s second to come to New York, was her first play to garner wide attention and during that period, the playwright won three Obie Awards in New York (1982, Cloud 9; 1983, Top Girls; 2005, A Number) and a Society of West End Theatre Award in London in 1988. 

Churchill’s best known for works dramatizing the abuse of power and exploring sexual politics and feminist themes using a non-realistic style.  She experimented with form, though her themes remained constant.  In 1991, for example, she incorporated dance, mime, and singing into the script of Lives of the Great Poisoners, which she wrote in collaboration with composer Orlando Gough (operas Kiss, 1989 – TV; Critical Mass, 2007 – Almeida Opera; The Finnish Prisoner,  2007 – Finnish National Opera; orchestral works Transmission 2011 and XX Scharnhorst, 2011 and ‘12 – site specific for the HMS Bellfast on the River Thames) and choreographer Ian Spink (Australian Ballet, Australian Dance Theatre, Dance Company of New South Wales).  In 2009, controversy arose around Churchill’s 10-minute play, Seven Jewish Children: A Play for Gaza, her response to Israel’s 2008 military strike on Gaza, because of its negative portrayal of Israelis.  (This uproar also hit Washington, D.C., and is mentioned in my post “The First Amendment & The Arts, Redux,” 13 February.)  In spite of this, Royal Holloway College in Surrey named its new theater after the playwright in 2010.  During the 2013-2014 season, Churchill worked with the New York Theater Workshop on her new drama, Love and Information, which ran from February to April 2014. 

Her dramaturgy employs elements of Brechtian Epic Theater as well as Artaud’s Theater of Cruelty.  As she developed her style, her Postmodern plays became more and more fragmented and surrealistic (both characteristics being evident in Cloud Nine).  The young troupes with which she started out commonly used long periods of improvisation to develop their productions and Churchill continued this practice with her own work.  Her plays always contain strong political commentary, and alongside her focus on sexual politics and feminism, Churchill displays a definite streak of socialism, critical of most standard capitalist values such as aggressive wealth acquisition and getting ahead, in her writing (think the Bernie Sanders of the stage).  She’s also a vocal supporter of Palestinian causes (and has been accused of being anti-Israeli and anti-Semitic, mostly by rightist Israelis and Jews and conservative media).  Increasingly, the playwright abandoned the semblance of Realism and pushed the boundaries of theater.  In 1997, she and Gough collaborated on Hotel, a “choreographed opera” or “sung ballet” that takes place in a hotel room. 

Churchill’s plays originally seen in London and then in New York City include Cloud 9, Owners, Traps, Mad Forest, Far Away, A Number, Seven Jewish Children, Love and Information (all at the New York Theatre Workshop); Top Girls, Fen, Serious Money, Ice Cream, The Skriker, Drunk Enough to Say I Love You? (all at the Public Theater and Top Girls recently also at the Manhattan Theatre Club); Blue Heart (BAM).  Other plays include Light Shining in Buckinghamshire, Vinegar Tom, Softcops, Three More Sleepless Nights, A Mouthful of Birds (with David Lan).  The playwright has also written translations, including Thyestes (Seneca), A Dream Play (Strindberg), and Bliss (Olivier Choinière, French Canadian writer).  Her music-theatre compositions include Lives of the Great Poisoners, Hotel, A Ring a Lamp a Thing (all with composer Gough).  James Macdonald, director of ATC’s Cloud Nine, mounted Lives of the Great Poisoners and Thyestes in London, Top Girls and A Number in New York, and Drunk Enough to Say I Love You? and Love and Information in both cities. 

I’ve seen quite a few productions at the Atlantic Theater Company, from Wolf Lullaby by Hillary Bell in 1998 and The Water Engine & Mr. Happiness by David Mamet in 1999, to Mamet’s Sexual Perversity in Chicago and American Buffalo in 2000, to  Eugene Ionesco’s The Bald Soprano and The Lesson in 2004 to A Second Hand Memory by Woody Allen and Romance by Mamet in 2005, to John Patrick Shanley’s Storefront Church in 2012 and John Guare’s 3 Kinds of Exile in 2013.  (Those last two have been reported on ROT: 16 June 2012 and 27 June 2013, respectively.)  The company was founded in 1985 by playwright David Mamet, actor William H. Macy, and 30 of their acting students from New York University, inspired by the historical examples of the Group Theatre and Konstantin Stanislavsky.   ATC (co-founded by a playwright) believes that the story of a play and the intent of its playwright are at the core of the creative process.  Though ATC does present work by classic and modern classic writers like Shakespeare, Chekhov, Ionesco, Harley Granville-Barker, and J. B. Priestley, the works the company produces mostly are contemporary realistic dramas by writers such as Allen, David Hare, Ethan Coen, Guare, and Mamet.  Since its start, ATC has produced more than 120 plays, including the Tony Award-winning production of Spring Awakening (which the company moved to Broadway in 2006 and is now having a Broadway revival with a mixed cast of hearing and deaf actors).

The company maintains two theaters in Chelsea: the 199-seat Linda Gross Theater on West 20th Street in the parish hall of the former St. Peter’s Episcopal Church, built in 1854 and renovated in 2012, and the 99-seat black-box Stage 2 on West 16th Street in the former Port Authority Building.  Stage 2, which opened in June 2006, is the home of Atlantic’s new play development program.  ATC also operates the Atlantic Acting School, a professional conservatory and a studio of the NYU acting program; the school teaches Atlantic Technique, following Practical Aesthetics, an acting system originally conceived by Mamet and Macy.

The structure of Churchill’s Cloud Nine is unusual (especially for the 1980s) and greatly affects the narrative of the play.  Act one is set, for instance, in Victorian times (the published edition says 1880, but it’s never intended to be that specific—even the costumes cover several decades of the late Victorian era) in an unidentified British colony in Africa.  The second act is set in 1979 in London, but Churchill tells us that for the characters, only 25 years has passed; several characters from the first act return, a quarter of a century older (and played by different actors), joined by some new ones.  The roles are cast—in a specific scheme set down in the script—across genders, ages, and races: several of the female characters (including a five-year­-old girl in act two) are played by men, a male child is portrayed by a woman, and the sole native African character is played by a white actor.  (I’ll address this in a bit.) 

In the first act, we meet Clive (Clarke Thorell in a performance one blogger described as a “Terry Thomas type veneer”), a colonial official who apparently administers the colony; his wife Betty (Chris Perfetti); their son, Edward (Brooke Bloom), who’s confused about his gender identity (today, we’d identify him as transgender—which wouldn’t have been recognized in 1979, let alone 1880—and gay—anathema in Victoria’s day); and their daughter, Victoria (portrayed by a doll).  Also in the household are Betty’s mother, Maud (Lucy Owen); Edward’s governess, Ellen (Izzie Steele); and the family’s African servant, Joshua (Sean Dugan).  They are awaiting the arrival from the bush of Clive’s friend Harry Bagley (John Sanders), an explorer, but just as the family is gathered on the veranda, in rushes their neighbor Mrs. Saunders (Steele), a recent widow who’s clearly frightened.  Clive explains early in the act that there’s a disturbance brewing among the local tribes, though we never learn the specifics and Clive and Harry don’t discuss it in front of the women and children.  Everyone’s very stiff-upper-lip, of course, like proper English gentlemen and ladies—except, of course, when the veil slips a little when they think they aren’t being observed.  After all, the colony is a little bit of England and they are all there to do their duties, fulfill their prescribed roles—as British imperialists; as men and women; as husbands, wives, and children; as mothers and fathers—whatever the Empire and the queen expects and demands of them.  The act opens with a rendition by the family and Joshua of “Come Gather Sons of England,” a Victorian patriotic hymn with decidedly imperialist and militarist sentiments.

Of course, not all is what it seems—actually almost nothing is what it seems!  Though Joshua (played by a white actor) has announced in the opening:

My skin is black but oh my soul is white

I hate my tribe.  My master is my light.

I only live for him.  As you can see,

What white men want is what I want to be,

we discover that he’s not as loyal to his colonial masters as they believe.  (Inscrutability is usually a stereotype of Asians, but it’s probably a skill learned by all colonially subjugated peoples.)  Not only is he insubordinate to Betty when Clive isn’t around, but he’s in a sexual relationship with manly, dashing Harry.  In fact, Churchill reveals pretty quickly some example of every sexual relationship there is (oh, except bestiality, I guess) in the rest of act one.  Betty (played by a man) wants Harry, to whom she’d become attracted on a previous visit, to take her way with him when he inevitably leaves; Harry, on the other hand, likes to have sex with both Joshua and Edward (played by a woman), who declares, “What father wants I’d dearly like to be. / I find it rather hard as you can see”; governess Ellen is in love with Betty; and Clive lusts after Mrs. Saunders.  (This is my second play this season in which a man puts his head up under a woman’s dress and performs oral sex as the woman moans in ecstasy.  “I can’t concentrate,” groans Mrs. Saunders.)  At the end of act one, as Clive is making a speech at the contrived wedding of Harry and Ellen, Joshua stands in the back of the gathering, pointing a rifle at his master.  Only Edward sees this, and the lights go out on this tableau.

In the second act, the story jumps ahead about a hundred years to 1979 (the present when the play was written and first performed).  In Churchill’s modern day, women seem to be in control, at least on the relationship level, and gay people get to live their lives the way they want—more or less.  They still run into roadblocks, but they aren’t erected by straight men, like the Clives of the world.  (In real life, of course, the Clives may have changed their tactics and even some of their motivations—the world map was far less pink by the ’70s—but make no mistake, they were still running things.  Despite the fact that Margaret Thatcher—who was really a Clive in drag anyway—was elected prime minister in May 1979.  British imperialism is still on display: one of the women in act two has a brother who was a British soldier killed in Northern Ireland—his ghost appears to her briefly.)

Remembering that for the characters in Cloud Nine, only 25 years has elapsed, Victoria (now played by Lucy Owen) and Edward (Chris Perfetti), Clive and Betty’s daughter and son from act one, are at the center of the narrative.  Eddy’s grown up to be gay and Vicky, whose married to intense, but nevertheless talkative Martin (John Sanders), has decided to leave him and move in with Lin (Izzie Steele), a divorced lesbian mom.  Edward, working as a gardener in the park where Lin and Victoria bring their children, has begun a difficult affair with Gerry (Sean Dugan), a sort of teddy boy-manqué (he wears denim instead of leather), whose into promiscuity (in this dawn of the AIDS crisis, just breaking into the news when the play débuted in New York).  Even Betty entertains the idea of taking up with Gerry—until he explains he’s totally gay, even as Eddy’s begun to explore his own bisexuality.  Vicky’s raising her unseen son, Tommy, with little help from Martin, and Lin looks after her little daughter, Cathy (a bratty Clarke Thorell), by herself.  (Whereas little Edward played with dolls, much to his father’s dismay, in act two, Cathy likes toy guns and fighting with the boys, which Lin doesn’t discourage.  What dismays Lin, though, is Cathy’s preference for dresses over jeans!)  Victoria leaves Martin and sets up a household with Lin and their kids, and when he breaks up with Gerry, who’s a tad commitment-phobic, Edward moves in with them in a ménage-à-trois (or -cinque, if you count in the two kids)—which one reviewer called “a polysexual thruple.”  Betty announces that she’s left Clive (the 1979 incarnation of whom we don’t see) and suggests that she, too, join Lin, Vicky, and Eddy.  She’s been married for so long, living as the adjunct to her husband, that she has no idea how to live as a single woman in charge of her own life.  (Back in the first act, Betty announced, “I am a man’s creation as you see, and what men want is what I want to be.”)  Her mistaken attempt at hooking up with Gerry, even though it came to naught, has given her some courage.  (And Gerry may get back together with Edward anyway.) 

In a scene with Victoria, Lin, and Edward, who’ve been drinking pretty heavily, in the yard of their shared house, Victoria leads them in an incantation to call forth “The Goddess.”  Afterwards, Victorian characters from the first act (and Lin’s dead brother) begin appearing, reprising lines from their earlier dialogue.  After a conversation with Gerry about life and love, Betty finally accepts herself for who she is, rather than what men wanted her to be—and her younger self appears to her and they hug.

I don’t think I can resolve that question I brought up earlier—we’ve all grown too wise to return to the mindset of 35 years ago—but it’s curious because I’m pretty sure Churchill intended the play’s second act to be a stern comment on the then-current sexual culture in England.  (The first act was the “control group” in a way: the Victorian society which we take for granted was repressed and moralistic—despite the facts under the surface.)  Actually, I like theater (and literature) that makes me ponder that kind of question.  It means the piece is really doing more than just telling a story.  (This is one of my criteria for “good theater,” if ROT-readers recall.  The other one’s “theatricality”--and Cloud Nine has that in spades.  [My fullest definition of these standards is in “By the Way, Meet Vera Stark,” 27 May 2011.])

The playwright wrote that

the idea of colonialism as a parallel to sexual oppression . . . had been briefly touched on in the workshop.  When I thought of the colonial setting the whole thing fell quite quickly into place.  Though no character is based on anyone in the company, the play draws deeply on our experiences, and would not have been written without the workshop.

The way I see it, Churchill exposes the hidden lives of the vaunted conformist and conventional Victorians that legend tells us was really seething with all kinds of illicit sexual practices.  (ATC adds that Cloud Nine “is about power, politics, family, [and] Queen Victoria,” as well as sex, which in Cloud Nine includes not only extra-marital affairs and homosexuality, but bisexuality, miscegenation, and pederasty as well; in act two Churchill gets in a little incest as well.)  All the coveted relationships are forbidden in this society and all are unrequited even though everyone declares his or her love or desire straightforwardly (when, of course, they think no one’s listening).  Since none of this would have been openly tolerated in Victorian Britain (or America, either), however, it had to be covered up and denied (“You don’t feel what you think you do,” Betty tells Ellen), hence the sham marriage between Harry and Ellen arranged by Clive.  It also accounts for Clive’s maintaining his marriage to Betty even after he learns of her attachment to Harry—appearances must be maintained.  Never mind, of course, that Clive himself is guilty of a little extra-marital dalliance himself—with Mrs. Saunders, herself an example of another kind of Victorian anomaly: the independent woman who doesn’t need a man to justify her life. 

There’s a good deal of humor, some of it wry and ironic and other bits nearly farcical, in act one, which is largely a satire.  Churchill mocks the Victorian image in order to set it up for contrast with “modern” England.  It’s humor, of course, with an edge, and there’s less of it in the second part of the play.  Act two, which Adam Feldman called “uncorseted” in Time Out New York, a metaphor I find apt, pokes some fun at relationships (gay and straight), parenting, and sex, but the jokes are fewer and less funny than in act one.  Act two, largely realistic in style, is where Churchill seems to be making her main points about the U.K. and the world.  Another contrast between the two parts of Cloud Nine is that most of the characters in act one are focused on what others—men, whites, adults—expect of them, but in act two, everyone’s concerned first with her or his own desires and needs first and foremost.  Even repressed Betty, more a refugee from the ’50s than a left-over Victorian, eventually finds a way to pursue what she wants from life.

Then Churchill reveals her vision of modern times, a Britain where women and gays make their own decisions about how to live openly and without guile or subterfuge.  In fact, the sole heterosexual male in the second act cast is depicted as something of a blowhard and feminist poseur.  But Churchill’s dramatic vision doesn’t exactly line up with actual Thatcherite Britain; it’s as much a fairy tale as the Victorian story.  (In England and Wales, homosexuality wasn’t even legalized until 1967; in Scotland, that didn’t happen until 1981 and in Northern Ireland, 1982.  Other gender-preference rights and protections didn’t come along until the 21st century.  By 1979 in the U.S., anti-sodomy laws had been struck down or repealed in only 21 of 50 states; they weren’t declared unconstitutional nationwide until 2003.)

As for the cross casting, Churchill explained:

There were no black members of the company and this led me to the idea of Joshua being so alienated from himself and so much aspiring to be what white men want him to be that he is played by a white.  Similarly, Betty, who has no more respect for women than Joshua has for blacks, and who wants to be what men want her to be, is played by a man.  For Edward to be played by a woman is within the English tradition of women playing boys (e.g. PETER PAN); for Cathy to be played by a man is a simple reversal of this.  Of course, for both that reversal highlights how much they have to be taught to be society’s idea of a little boy and girl.

So just as male dominanation and sexual oppression in the home recapitulates Western imperialism and suppression of the local population abroad, gender roles and even gender itself is revealed to be performative, something we learn to portray to accommodate social norms.  Further, it’s all something of a chimera anyway. 

The doubling scheme can vary from production to production—as it did between the 1979 première at the Royal Court and the revival there a year later, as well as the Theatre de Lys mounting in ’81 and ATC’s.  It all depends on the director’s desire “partly to fit the parts to the different actors and partly to give us all a chance to try something new.”  But the dramatist warned, “Different doublings throw up different resonances.”  At ATC, for instance, it said something to me that the actor playing Maud, Betty’s stern and unbending mother in act one, returns as free-living (and -loving) Victoria, Maud’s granddaughter, in act two, and that openly gay Edward in the second act is portrayed by the actor who’d been Betty, his convention-bound mother, in the first.  It’s also interesting when Betty in act two embraces Betty from act one since the actors had played mother and daughter in the colonial scenes and now the question arises, are we seeing modern Betty embracing her predecessor—or the modern mother accepting her younger daughter?  Maybe it’s both at once?  Another casting plan wouldn’t have raised that question. 

ATC’s production of Cloud Nine, under the direction of James Macdonald, was conceived and designed to be performed in the round.  Set designer Dane Laffrey created a plain wooden circle of bleachers, resembling a miniature bull ring (or, as one cyber reviewer called it, “a wooden O”), that replaces the Linda Gross’s normal seating plan.  (This alone is an element of “theatricality.”)  This set-up brings the performers into close range of the spectators, but it also reduces the practicality of props and set pieces.  As a result, while the action of the play and the work of the actors is right in front of us, the production needs few stage objects—just the bare necessities for the characters’ activities.  In the first act, the ground is covered with coarse, red artificial dirt; in the second, it’s artificial grass.  Churchill’s play doesn’t need any more, as long as the actors do the kind of superb work ATC’s cast provided.  It’s a play of the imagination in any case, so stimulating ours helps make it work better anyway.  (The bleachers are cushioned—and additional padding is available for those with sensitive tushies—but the narrow benches, low backs, and cramped legroom made the long performance—2½ hours with one intermission following the hour-and-twenty-minute first act—a bit less comfortable than the usual theater seats.  This seems to be my year for long plays, and if the show weren’t as excellent an experience as this was, it would have been unpleasant.  I don’t imagine that the 1981 U.S. première was staged this way, since I doubt the producers and impresario Lucille Lortel would have redesigned the Theatre de Lys into an arena.)

Scott Zielinski’s lighting is bright and glaring, especially in act one, evoking, at least in my mind, the “midday sun” out into which only “mad dogs and Englishmen” venture.  In act two, there’s nary a sight of London’s vaunted fog or rain—it’s nearly as bright there as in Africa.  The clothes of Gabriel Berry reflect this tropical or temperate summer glare, as far as the period’s strictures will allow—and not a hint of drag anywhere.  The Victorians, of course, are covered from head (the period wigs are by Cookie Jordan) to toe; even young Edward wears long stockings to cover his legs, left bare by his knickers—and despite the heat, all the men wear jackets of one kind or another just to keep up propriety.  (Joshua is dressed in wrapped fabric with a turban, such as I might imagine in a movie set in British South Asia—say Malaya or Burma.)  In act two, the garb loosens up a bit as far as conventions go.  Darren West’s sound design, from the jungle noises and native drums of Africa to the off-stage urban soundscape of London, set a perfect tone, somewhere between scary hyperreal and caricature.  (The jungle sounds might have been the soundtrack from an old Johnnie Weissmuller Tarzan flick or something with Stewart Granger.)  And I should say a word of praise for the dialect coaching of Ben Furey: while not everyone was note-perfect in their British dialects, all did a more than acceptable job and they were consistent, which is almost more important than plug-accuracy.

The directing of James Macdonald, an Obie-winner for Churchill’s Love and Information at NYTW and helmer of the film version of the writer’s A Number on HBO, was controlled and, given the peculiarities of the performance space, smooth.  From 1992 to 2006, Macdonald was associate director of the Royal Court, the cradle of many of Churchill’s plays.  He maneuvered the company from the bound-up 1880s to the liberated 1979 without a glitch, maintaining a continuity in the second act to the first despite the casting shifts.  (Of course, the actors are as much responsible for these accomplishments as Macdonald is, but they’ll get their due momentarily.)  Most importantly, the director established the right tone for the ATC production of Cloud Nine to keep it both topical and revelatory, and humorous and slightly mocking.  He kept the actors all in the same universes, which I imagine isn’t an easy task with Churchill’s scripts—a bit, I imagine, like wrangling artistic cats. 

Cloud Nine is clearly an ensemble piece, and it’s key for each actor not only to be on the same page as the rest of the cast, but attuned to the others.  (There are no star turns in Cloud Nine.)  That makes it difficult to single out any one actor for special mention, so I won’t except to note a few moments.  I was particularly impressed by the scene in which Harry inadvertently reveals his sexuality to Clive: Sanders and Thorell display the exact level of squirminess and discomfort for the setting, time, and tone of the play.  (Even unease is an emotion frowned upon by the Victorians.)  The same for Clive and Mrs. Saunders’s oral sex scene, clearly something outside the image of Victorian Britain; Thorell and Steele pull it off (as it were) perfectly.  (I said that this was the second scene like this I’ve seen this season.  The other, in the Acting Company’s Desire, report posted on 26 September, was also well performed.  In the acting sense, I mean, of course.)  The pompous speech by Martin in act two is extremely well presented by Sanders, with just the right touches of smarm and earnestness, and Betty’s second-act monologue, which ends up extolling masturbation, is delicately but forcefully (it’s proof that at least an accomplished actor can do both) delivered by Bloom.  There are other very nice bits by Bloom’s Edward and Perfetti’s Betty in act one (not to mention Dugan’s almost affectless portrayal of Joshua), as well as Steele’s frustrated and bereft Lin and Thorell’s rambunctious (dare I say “tomboyish”) Cathy in act two.  But this production must come down in the end to the ensemble, and this one, with the guidance of director Macdonald, performs magnificently.

Among my recent shows, I was disappointed (not to mention dismayed) at the lack of press coverage for a number of them; there seems to be a cut-back on theater reporting even among the cyber reviewers.  Cloud Nine, on the other hand, seems to have been deemed worthy of coverage from most New York outlets (though a few, such as the New York Post, the Wall Street Journal, and Variety, apparently didn’t judge the revival significant enough to review—at least not on line).  New York’s Daily News declared the production a “very fine revival,” with Joe Dziemianowicz praising, among other aspects, “Caryl Churchill’s wicked and funny gender-bending script about sex, power and roles.”  The Newsman also reported that “the most compelling reason is the sublime actress Brooke Bloom, who stands out in a well-oiled ensemble.”  And though the “[c]ramped wooden bleachers may make your back ache,” Dziemianowicz argued, “[t]he play and the performances will make your head buzz.”  In Long Island’s Newsday, Linda Winer made the intriguing statement,

The temporary reconfiguration of the proscenium stage into theater-in-the-round is pleasantly disorienting at the Atlantic Theater.  But that literal shift in perspective is nothing compared to the head-spinning, giddy thrills and vertiginous goings-on in Caryl Churchill’s still-wonderful “Cloud Nine.”

Remarking that the cross-casting in the 1981 U.S. première “felt giddily ahead of its time,” Winer added, “Now, in a production impeccably cast and directed by . . . James Macdonald, we’re aware that a work this clever will always be a step ahead, always pushing us playfully to see human connections that are elusive, important and seriously fun.”  With special praise for the acting of Bloom, Perfetti, Owen, and Dugan, as well as Berry’s costumes, Winer concluded by stating bluntly: “All perfect.”

Ben Brantley of the New York Times averred that “few writers have come closer to making sense of the hormonal urges that rule, transport and disrupt our lives than Caryl Churchill does in ‘Cloud Nine.’”  Calling the playwright “one of the wisest and bravest playwrights on the planet,” Brantley stated, “More than three decades ago—when ‘trans’ as a prefix most commonly meant something to do with automobiles she dared set up camp in that hazy frontier land where the boundaries of gender and the rules of attraction blur and dissolve.”  The Timesman continued his praise, writing that “James Macdonald’s pheromone-fresh production, which features a deliciously mutable cast of seven, makes it clear that today we’re still living in this gray zone of polymorphous selves, whether we admit it or not.”  After expressing qualms that the play he saw and “loved” in 1981 might seem “like a worthy . . . artifact,” Brantley attested that “Ms. Churchill’s play is far less polemical and arch than I remembered.  It has none of the quaint, hipper-than-thou smugness that often clings to works once perceived as being defiantly ahead of their times.”  Assuring prospective theatergoers that Cloud Nine never “comes across as anything like a debate or a lecture,” the Times reviewer observed that “the ensemble members feel utterly, emotionally in the moment.  If the actors and actresses ever seem distanced from their parts, it’s only because their characters, too, are wearing disguises that don’t fit them naturally.”  The review-writer continued that Cloud Nine is “an ideal showcase for the teasing metaphors and metamorphoses in which theater specializes,” but, he informed us, “its artifice never feels like a stunt.”  Brantley concluded, “This compassionate, tough-loving production finds the ecstasy, tragedy and exhilarating madness of what it means to be part of this eternal ball of confusion.”  In amNew York, Matt Windman dubbed the ATC production “a fine revival of one of the most dynamic English dramas of the past four decades.”  After joining the chorus of journalists who complained about the seating structure, Windman concluded that if would-be spectators can withstand the discomfort, “‘Cloud Nine’ is experimental, highly political playwriting at its best.”

In the Village Voice, Miriam Felton-Dansky dubbed Cloud Nine an “incisive, ironic” play and a “Brechtian fantasia” that’s under “expert direction” by Macdonald.  “In the hands of this excellent ensemble,” averred Felton-Dansky, “Churchill’s clear-eyed, darkly comic play shows us . . . just how revelatory revivals can be.”  Jesse Green, characterizing the ATC staging as “a superb revival” in New York magazine, said that the play “has only grown fuller, meatier, sadder, funnier, sexier, and more provocative—more theatrical, too—as the conditions from which it arose have changed radically, and have not.”  Green described the cast as “excellent” and wrote, “I trust they will haunt me as long as the original cast did because I’d like to see what this indispensable modern classic has become in another 34 years.”

In Time Out New York, Adam Feldman dubbed Cloud Nine a “delicious hash of gender and genre” and warned that it “may be less surprising than it was 35 years ago,” but he added that “director James Macdonald and his cast . . . keep its edges sharp.”  The man from TONY concluded, “Troubled and troubling, puckish and perverse, Churchill’s play is still a slice of theater heaven.”  Jesse Oxfeld characterized Cloud Nine, which he described as a “semi-ironic, farcical script,” as “a funny, fantastical study of the burdens placed upon us by expectations, and whether they can ever really be thrown off” in the Hollywood Reporter.  He went on to say, “There are many remarkable and surprising things in Churchill’s landmark play, . . . [b]ut perhaps most remarkable is to consider how its gleeful gender- and orientation-bending . . . would have been received in a Britain on the verge of Thatcherism.”  The current revival, he said, “remains intriguing, if no longer quite so subversive.”  Oxfeld did lament, “There’s a sense of fun in the performers that is lost from Act I to Act II, or at least in the characters, which renders their performances less crackling,” even though he acknowledged, “The cast is strong.”  He designated one of Betty’s final lines in act two “an epigraph for the play”: “If there isn’t a right way to do things, you have to invent one.” 

In the cyber press, the sentiment was largely the same, despite more coverage.  On the Huffington Post, Wilborn Hampton, calling the ATC Cloud Nine “a delightfully ribald revival,” wrote that “Churchill has been one of the most iconoclastic writers in the English theater over the past half century, pillorying the hypocrisies of society with acerbic wit and humor and uncanny insight.”  (He also quipped, “Should one be tempted to think that present-day openness on sexual matters makes the play irrelevant they should ask Kim Davis her opinion on the subject.”)  Though Hampton felt the play is “a challenge for actors,” he applauded director Macdonald, who “has put together a first-rate cast that doesn’t miss a nuance in the play.”  TheaterMania’s Zachary Stewart pronounced that Cloud Nine  “brilliantly charts the life and death of a global superpower—a cautionary tale Americans would be wise to heed.”  He reported, “Under the sensitive and surefooted direction of James Macdonald, Cloud Nine offers a smart social critique that transcends time.” 

Noting that Churchill’s “focus [is] on gender, economics and power,” Elyse Sommer reported on CurtainUp that “all of which Cloud Nine combines with unique and hilarious theatricality.”  Of the cross-casting and doubling, Sommer wrote, “Expertly done and fun as [it] is, once you catch on to the satirical expose of Victorian hypocrisy, the humor wears a bit thin.”  She added, “What’s more, the gender and race blind casting tends to make the revelations about each character’s true nature somewhat predictable.”  Sommer also seemed to have been turned off by the play’s length, observing first that Churchill has since learned to write shorter scripts and ending her notice with the statement that “one can’t help wishing Mr. Macdonald had speeded things up.”  (I have to remark that I may have found the seating set-up less than comfortable, which Sommer complains of at some length, but I never felt the play was too long to sustain its dramatic point.)  The CU reviewer ended her notice by stating that Cloud Nine is “still a provocative entertainment.  But don’t expect to be on cloud nine in terms of your physical comfort zone.”  Michael Dale called Macdonald’s revival of Cloud Nine “terrific” on Broadway World and reported that the play “has been described as carnivalesque in style; a reflection on its treatment of serious subjects with an absurd view of reality.”  Dale continued, “Light on plot, Churchill’s dark comedy bends time, gender and race in an evening that is more fixed on roles and relationships.”  

Matthew Murray of Talkin’ Broadway declared that “Cloud Nine feels fresh, crazy, and relevant enough to have been written yesterday.”  Indeed, Murray felt that societal questions and debates of the last few years “make the Atlantic Theater Company’s new revival of the play even sharper and more trenchant than it might otherwise seem.”  He asserted that “Churchill so determinedly doesn’t let them or us off the hook until the very end, when past and present collide violently together, is a mark of bravery that lets this bizarre, compelling piece work yet today.”  The TB writer, however, objected, “That is not to say it works perfectly.  Macdonald and his cast haven’t yet unlocked the same playful verve in Act II that they have in Act I, leaving the last hour of the two-and-a-half-hour evening feeling drearier and less specific than it should.”  He explained, “There’s an uneasy sense of this being two different (if related) plays performed sequentially rather than a single continuous thought.”  Nonetheless, director Macdonald has “done well enough to keep you buzzing with bright appreciation even after the play has ended.” 

'Julius Caesar' (Donmar Warehouse)

I hadn’t been to St. Ann’s Warehouse in DUMBO since March 2012 when I saw the Wooster Group-New York City Players collaboration, Eugene O’Neill’s Early Plays, but on Friday evening, 4 October, my frequent theater companion, Diana, and I drove over the Manhattan Bridge to see the U.S. première of Donmar Warehouse’s all-female Julius Caesar, which opens St. Ann’s 2013-14 season.  (Early Plays, reported on ROT on 14 March 2012, was presented in St. Ann’s previous location on Water Street, its home since 2000.  The theater moved to Jay Street later in 2012 and will move again to new, permanent digs back on Water Street in 2015.)  Scheduled to run through 3 November, the Brooklyn production began previews on 3 October and opened on 9 October.  Directed by Phyllida Lloyd, Shakespeare’s play was presented in London from November 2012 to February 2013.  Most of the London cast remains with the New York staging, including Harriet Walter (as Brutus), who appeared as Queen Elizabeth I in Lloyd’s production of Friedrich Schiller’s Mary Stuart in 2009 (see my report on ROT, 22 June 2009).

Lloyd has reset the Roman forum to a women’s prison where the inmates and guards perform the drama of power, murder, and betrayal.  According to Donmar’s publicity, Lloyd believes that the play’s impact is enhanced “by the backdrop of female incarceration, a live thrash metal band, and the emotional nuances inherent to women playing men at their most vulnerable.”  For the International Herald Tribune review of the London performance, Matt Wolf described the presentation as “belligerently high-concept.” 

A fair amount of the advanced press coverage has been focused on the gyno-centric nature of the cast.  Most make the point that there have always been lots of all-male Shakespearean productions, including the Globe Theatre renditions of Twelfth Night  and Richard III (both in 2012), which will open in rep on Broadway in November.  Of course, almost all the coverage has mentioned that in Elizabethan times, all of Shakespeare’s female characters were played by males—usually boys—and no women were permitted on stage (Shakespeare in Love notwithstanding) until the tradition was imported from France and the Continent after the Restoration in 1660.  (The existential trick comes when those women-played-by-males disguise themselves as men, a frequent conceit in Shakespeare: consider Viola in Twelfth Night and Imogen in Cymbeline, among others.)  Lloyd’s Julius Caesar, which started life the year Josie Rourke was appointed the first female artistic director of Donmar Warehouse, is by way of turn-about.  Note has been taken, too, that women playing male Shakespearean characters is itself an old tradition, including Sarah Bernhardt’s Hamlet in 1899 and more recently, Fiona Shaw’s Richard II in 1995 at the National and Vanessa Redgrave’s Prospero at the Globe in 2000.  (In this country, Sarah Siddons performed Hamlet in 1775 and in 1983, Diane Venora played the role for Joseph Papp.  In 1837, Charlotte Cushman played Romeo in Albany to her sister’s Juliet.)  Last June and July, another Julius Caesar on stage in New York City, the Smith Street Stage’s modern-dress production in Carroll Park, Brooklyn, presented a Julius Caesar not only performed by a woman but as a woman (still named Julius); Trebonius and Cicero, were also played as females. In the performance at St. Ann’s, the female prisoners are all playing men. 

St. Ann’s artistic director, Susan Feldman, said at first she thought the all-female concept “would be gimmicky”—until she saw a performance.  Arguments supporting Lloyd’s interpretation range from combating the dearth of juicy roles for women, especially in the classics, to balancing the scales for all the men-as-women productions, to female empowerment (all those women with weapons and power!).  At least one theater writer, Tim Walker of The Telegraph, declared, “[W]hat a load of old tosh it all is.”  (For the Brit-deficient, ‘tosh’ is what our English cousins say when they mean ‘crock of shit.’)  He went on to spit out, “Shakespeare never, after all, believed that a single word he wrote would ever be uttered upon a stage by a woman . . .” and ultimately laid the blame for his dismay on Lloyd: “It is an absurd contrivance which serves only to demonstrate quite how imprisoned the director is by a patently daft idea, if not also her political correctness and vanity.”  To add insult to injury, Walker made a point of praising the Globe’s two all-male productions, calling them “classy, respectful and hugely entertaining.”  (The Telegraph was apparently so aggrieved by the production that it ran three negative reviews.)

The Donmar company seems to have espoused the rationale that the production gives women chances to do the kind or meaty and substantial parts usually reserved for men.  “It's not just about employment in the theater,” says Rourke.  “It's about hearing women's voices at the center of things, literally giving them roles to play in life and art.”  Lloyd asserts that this Julius Caesar gives the actresses opportunities to play roles other than “the love interest, the tyrant’s wife, the tyrant’s mistress,” and Frances Barber, Caesar at St. Ann’s, feels that the director “wanted us to get rid absolutely of any sort of frilly, female, wily, seductressy nonsense.”   “I find myself playing a lot of wives and girlfriends,” says Jenny Jules, the production’s Cassius, “or parts that support the men's meat-and-potatoes roles."  Jules continues: "It's really fantastic to just be given the chance to chomp on somebody like Cassius. . . .  If, as a woman, I have been allowed to be aggressive or confrontational or violent on stage, the character is always thought of as the villainess.“  And Cush Jumbo, who plays Mark Antony, adds that “you have to be the soundboard of your own work.  You have to balance things out carefully so as not to offend; you feel you can't go too far one way or the other.”  The production’s Brutus, Harriet Walter, had felt that her Shakespearean days were behind her because of the lack of strong female parts.  “Once I’d played Cleopatra,” Walter explains,  “I thought, ‘Now what can I do?’ Because any other female role I was offered in the Shakespeare canon was going to be inferior and less demanding. There was a certain logic to then turn to the male repertory.”  Lloyd, however, also takes up the empowerment argument: “We’re on a mission to inspire women to find their voices.”  Her aim is to “to make young women in the audience feel they are potentially part of not just the romantic and the domestic, but that they could be at the center of the political sphere.”  Says Lloyd, “I wanted to celebrate the first time that a woman got the reins of what we would call a ‘big hitter’ in London theater.”  

Obviously, I can’t speak much to Lloyd’s last point, but I recognize the first ones.  Back in the ’70s and ’80s, African-American actors were making similar arguments for color-blind casting in classical plays because so many talented and well-trained actors weren’t getting the opportunities to play these great roles.  While it was fine to take a white actor and smear him with blackface so he could play Othello (Laurence Olivier, famously), why wasn’t it okay to cast a black actor as, say, Iago?  (In fact, I saw a very interesting staging of Othello in Washington with Avery Brooks as the Moor and Andre Braugher as his Ancient.  And last April, the Royal Shakespeare Company brought its 2012 production of Julius Caesar, which director Gregory Doran relocated to contemporary Africa with an all-black cast, to the Brooklyn Academy of Music.)  Color-blind casting may be a little easier to finesse than gender-blind, but the point is still the same.  It only remains, as far as I’m concerned, how well the director conceives the transformation and how well the company executes it.  But, with Tom Walker’s response in mind, I would never reject the concept: if Portia can stand before a Venetian court and argue that “The quality of mercy is not strained” in drag, then I can’t see denying a Redgrave, a Shaw, or a Walter the chance to stand on a stage and pronounce the great (male) speeches of the Bard.  (I’ve written on ROT on the subject of “non-traditional casting.”  See my post on 20 December 2009.)

So, before I assess how well I think Lloyd and the Donmar troupe executed their idea—or how well that idea itself worked on the St. Ann’s stage (well, performance space: there’s not really a stage per se)—let me try to describe the production.  It’s an integral part of the concept of the show.  First, you’ve read that the play is set in a woman’s prison—but that’s not entirely accurate.  This is a production of Julius Caesar by a group of inmates and the “set” (designed by Bunny Christie) is their common room (or whatever you’d call it), a large open space at the back of which is a wall with a garage-type door slightly stage right of center, a glassed-in booth with closed-circuit TV monitors stage left for the guards to survey the cell block (it also serves as the tech booth and the techies are costumed as guards, too), and a split-level catwalk with a metal railing that’s about seven feet up on stage right and maybe 10 or 12 feet high on the left; there’s a flight of metal stairs connecting the two levels.  The space, which has a bare cement floor, is set up like a proscenium stage with the spectators in steep metal risers across the front of the acting area.  There are two concrete columns just in front of the risers, the stage right one of which is occasionally used as a sort of crow’s nest.  The rest of the set is made up of whatever furniture and detritus lie about the space, found objects as it were, mostly odd chairs, a table or two, and porn mags. 

The inmate company—we don’t learn who produced or directed the diegetic performance, one of the prisoners, a prison staffer, or some outside contractor—seems somehow to have come up with makeshift costume pieces such as great coats, berets, and ski masks to cover their gray prison sweats, as well as props like red rubber gloves (to represent the bloody hands of the conspirators), a paper Burger King crown, knives (stand-ins for Shakespeare’s swords), and rifles and pistols (all harmless fakes, obviously).  (No credit is listed for the costumes, though they were apparently put together by designer Christie; the fights were choreographed by Kate Waters and the movement director was Ann Yee.)  The lighting is harsh and white, as if from fluorescents or floods (though, to be sure, it was subtly designed by Neil Austin for appropriate theatrical effects without violating the conceit) and the sound, including the heavy metal band on a rolling platform, is loud and unmodulated in the hard-surfaced, undampened room.  (The sound was designed by Tom Gibbons and the music composed by Gary Yershon.)

The audience, which had been waiting in the Brooklyn Roasting Company, a coffee-roasting business next door, enters through the garage doors on Jay Street, herded and monitored by guards (starting with the only two males in the company, who I think are either actual security guards or members of the St. Ann’s staff as they merely checked tickets and ushered us into the holding area, which looks like a loading dock.  (St. Ann’s new theater was formerly a furniture warehouse.)  There a squad of female guards warns us of the rules for prison visitors, our assigned role; hands out a list of “Visiting Information” (“If in an emergency you need to leave your seat, a prison officer will be present to escort you out.  Please be aware there is NO re-admission”); and barks instructions at us.  A second garage door opens on the platform at the other end of the loading dock, and we’re marshaled up the steps and into the performance area. The performance, it’s clear, has already begun. 

Once we’re seated—the spectators are herded over from the coffee business in two groups and the metal garage doors are opened and closed for each group, like passengers on a space ship passing through an airlock—the actors are escorted in through the inner garage door by a squad of officers who depart before the action starts.  This is a kind of environmental performance because, even though the actors use only the “stage” area, the whole room is part of the performance environment since we spectators are designated characters in the production. 

The play-within-the play, once it’s started, for the most part continues without the prison envelope leaking in directly.  There’s a modern-language preamble in which Mark Antony (Cush Jumbo) and her fellow inmates, wearing paper masks with Caesar’s (that is, Barber’s) face, participate in what Huffington Post’s Michael Giltz calls “a rousing bacchanal” set to punk-rock music (one on-line reviewer identifies the song as “a punk karaoke version of Jackie DeShannon's “When You Walk in the Room,” but I didn’t recognize it) that was an evocation of Caesar’s triumphant return to Rome.  Then, in the scene in which Caesar is killed, one member of the audience—it was a man the night I saw the show—is selected to come down and sit in one of the chairs occupied by the senator-assassins.  His only role is that of observer or witness and after the assassination, he’s escorted back to his seat.  (I’m not sure what the point of that is, however.)  More significantly, when Cinna the Poet appears, the actress portraying him is suddenly called out by an officer and another inmate (Helen Cripps) is pushed forward, a script thrust into her hands, and Julius Caesar continues.  A few moments later, when the crowd attacks the poet as a stand-in for Cinna the conspirator (Meline Danielewicz), the violence becomes more “real” than playacting—“Ow, that fuck ing hurt!” yells the jailbird—and the guards come rushing in to break up the assault.  Nonetheless, the atmosphere of the jail, in the terms of the popular imagination (consider Oz, Prison Break, or any such depiction), permeates the whole production, both the outer one and the diegetic one—which isn’t really surprising since we’re sitting in the set.

Now, I have to report that I was sorely disappointed in the whole proceeding.  A while ago (18 September 2009), I published an article on ROT called “Similes, Metaphors—And The Stage” in which I discussed the simile production, an interpretation of classic plays that “simply shifts the time or location to an analogous one nearer our own,” and the metaphorical kind that “examines the play from the inside, ‘generating provocative theatrical images . . . that are suggestive of the play rather than specific, reverberant rather than concrete.’”  (My article was based on Robert Brustein’s “Reworking the Classics: Homage or Ego Trip?” in the New York Times, which I republished on the blog on 10 March 2011.)  I put Lloyd’s version of Julius Caesar at the “the prosaic simile” end of the continuum, some distance from “the poetic metaphor.”  To be frank, it all seemed to me like “sound and fury, signifying nothing.”

I can well understand the impulse to let women inhabit those powerful male characters and get to speak those stirring words.  I have no fundamental objection to resetting a classic play, as I revealed in “Similes, Metaphors.”   So, what went awry, in my estimation, with Donmar’s Julius Caesar?  As I see it, three failings help keep this from being a good theater experience: the company’s philosophy or rationale, the production concept, and the physical production.  I’ll start with what did work for me, however: the acting.

The JC ensemble is mixed as far as experience and classical background is concerned.  Some, like Walter, who was made a Dame Commander of the Order of the British Empire in 2011, and Barber, have done all the major female Shakespearean roles and other classic parts; others are just starting out in their careers and have done mostly contemporary plays and film or TV roles.  Nonetheless, the company handled the characters well, not to mention the poetry.  If you add in the conceit that the actors are all playing prison inmates who are putting on a Shakespeare play, they come off even better because it lends an element of innate tension, violence, and anger to that of the Shakespearean story.  There’s no issue with the cast managing these male roles.  That’s especially true since the actresses aren’t pretending to be men, even if they’re not turning the male characters into women (as the other Brooklyn production of JC did).  I had no trouble accepting Walter as a strong, upright person with sincere beliefs and concerns but simultaneous doubts and insecurities about the severity of the actions he’s forced to take.  Walter is forthright and, while a commanding stage presence, thoughtful and occasionally uncertain.  Barber, by contrast, is more the gang leader, the warlord.  She’s shorter than Walter and, in the trench coat and beret, presents a square figure, solid and inflexible—what New York Timesman Ben Brantley describes as “the butchest of them all.”  (In fact, Barber’s stage image reminded me a lot of Boris Badenov, the Pottsylvanian spy character in the Rocky & Bullwinkle cartoon series of the 1960s, but without the accent—or the mustache.  Sorry—I know I’m a geezer.  What can I say?)  Barber exudes Caesar’s self-confidence (he defies the “Ides of March” warning, for instance) and innate cruelty (he force-feeds Jenny Jules’s Cassius a donut just because he looks suspiciously “lean and hungry”), but comes off as somewhat one-notish for the portion of the play in which the character appears.

In the final analysis, however, I found I was only mildly taken by Lloyd’s rationale for mounting this interpretation.  Yes, I know that actresses are given short shrift when it comes to the juicy roles in the classics.  In his review of the production, Brantley called Julius Caesar “one of Shakespeare’s most manly tragedies,” and someone did a count showing that the word ‘men’ comes up 54 times in JC and ‘women’ gets only four mentions.  But that’s not a revelation, and the perceived need to redress it isn’t a new phenomenon, either.  It seems to me that far too much emphasis has been placed on the rationale for doing this all-woman staging when all that’s really necessary is just to do it—and spend all the effort and focus on making the production’s point—the one about power, control, resentment, and repression.  I believe we’ll get the idea about female empowerment, both from a social and a theatrical standpoint.  Audiences aren’t really that benighted, though some directors and producers like to think we are.  (I wrote a post called “To Note, Or Not To Note” in which I made this point; see ROT on 28 August 2009.)  Do the show, I say; let the socio-political point fend for itself.

There’s a problem inherent in Lloyd’s fundamental premise, however.  She chose to do the play with women playing men: the characters are still men doing all that power-wielding and saber-rattling.  Diana suggested it might have been more interesting if the characters were the women inmates—a sort of West Side Story with JC as Leonard Bernstein, et al., did with Romeo and Juliet: turn the Roman men into contemporary female prisoners, say one jailhouse gang (led by Caesar and then Mark Antony) fighting another (commanded by Brutus and his crew) for dominance in the yard.  I’d need more time to think that out, but it would accomplish one thing this interpretation could use: putting the actual women, rather than women portraying men, in the positions of strength and control.  That’s the point of the exercise, as I understand it—along with the artistic one of letting actresses speak those magnificent lines.  (To be precise, the actresses at St. Ann’s aren’t really playing the men of Julius Caesar.  They’re playing female convicts who are playing the Shakespearean parts.  But we never learn who the prisoners are or what they want from this experience.  They’re not really there.)  I said this cast handled the powerful poetry excellently, but whoa!—how magnificent would it have been if actresses like Walter, Barber, Jules, and Jumbo got to bust loose on the roles themselves, too?  I’d pay to see that!  As it is, there are actresses saying the words—but not women.  It would take a lot more thought to create such a metaphorical adaptation than Lloyd’s simile production requires.  The first concept would be a more complex reconsideration than the second, which requires really nothing more than casting and a little costuming.  Lloyd’s version of the play doesn’t so much empower women as simply provide an opportunity for non-traditional casting.  That’s a nice goal, righteous and worthy on its own, but it doesn’t do what Lloyd’s troupe says their goal is and what Donmar’s and St. Ann’s publicity proclaims the show’s all about.

Now, I’ve gleaned from other cultural evidence (TV and movies, for instance) that social upheavals seem to come to the fore in Britain some years after they hit here.  British society, at least in its TV incarnation, went through the issues of racism long after they’d become familiar subjects of treatment in our cultural media, and the same with feminism and women’s issues.  (By the time Prime Suspect hit British TV, the idea of a female police detective with rank was no longer a new idea on U.S. sets.  We’d already done Cagney & Lacey, not to mention Police Woman, and female lieutenants and captains were already presences in TV cop shops here.  If Helen Mirren hadn’t been so good and the show overall so well made, they wouldn’t have gotten much notice.  The gender politics in the series seemed so settled to me that when it came up, it felt absolutely retro.)  I’m not saying that the problems have all been resolved.  Of course they haven’t; and we still have sexism, not to mention racism, in even official situations where you’d think it was long passé.  But as a selling point—‘We’re going to expose sexism and gender bias in the theater and strike a blow for women’s equality!’—just isn’t going to move me much.  I mean, didn’t we do that 30 years ago?  Not solve it, but make it an issue?  My consciousness has been raised, people! 

Of course, I’m not saying don’t do the show.  I’m saying don’t sell it on the basis of the contemporary (your contemporary) politics.  Focus on the play’s politics, Shakespeare’s politics.  If you do your jobs well, the politics will take care of itself—you’ll make your argument.  And, what’s more, I’ll get to come out of the show thinking, ‘Hey, they made a good point.  That’s right, too—and it’s still happening, isn’t it.’  I’ll feel like I worked something out without being led by the nose.  But tell me ahead of time, beat it into me that that’s what you’re up to, I’ll do what I’ve done now: come out of the theater (or, really, sit in it as the play’s unfolding) and say, ‘Okay, but I know all this—it’s the 21st century, for goodness’ sake.  You could say it in a sentence and it’d be just as revelatory as all this mishegoss.’ 

This disappointment with the context for the production was exacerbated by the discomfort generated by the physical set-up.  I already said the production is loud—the cement-and-metal room reverberates—and the heavy metal thrash music adds to this condition.  The actors all speak at top volume, though I’m sure there’s a rationale for that (prisons are loud places, men in combat shout a lot, and so on).  St. Ann’s molded plastic seats are hard (and I’m more than a touch arthritic; I said I was a geezer, remember), so prolonged sitting in a stiff, hard seat isn’t the greatest of pleasures for me.  Furthermore, the performance is two hours long without an intermission—no chance to unkink the joints or stretch what pass for muscles.  (There’s a practical reason most intermissionless shows are 90 minutes or less.)  Finally, the space isn’t air-conditioned and the heat builds up in the enclosed, concrete room with thousands of watts of stage lighting burning for a couple of hours.  Within minutes, sweat was dripping down my face and rolling down the back of my neck.  Ick!  (According to one of the Donmar performers acting as a guard when we were leaving, the company doesn’t usually perform in the warm season, but no one expected early October in New York City to be so August-like.  St. Ann’s does have air-conditioning—they turned it on after the play was over—but it’s an industrial system that makes a racket too loud for actors to project over the noise.)  By the time the performance was over, I was so anxious just to stand up, much less leave the room, that I’d begun to phase the play out.  Now, that’s clearly counterproductive.  (I confess that I feel uncomfortable letting physical discomfort affect my response to a theater performance, but I suspect that had I been engaged by the art more, the conditions in the auditorium wouldn’t have weighed so heavily on me.  It’s something of a chicken-and-egg proposition, I guess.)

At this writing, days after the production’s New York opening, not all outlets had run reviews.  (There are quite a few London notices on line, of course, such as the London Times and the Guardian, not to mention the IHT review that ran in the New York Times, but I didn’t comb through them.)  A “high-octane” production “brilliantly directed by Phyllida Lloyd” with “a terrific cast,”  Elisabeth Vincentelli of the New York Post calls the Donmar staging at St Ann’s.  It’s “gripping all the way through, from brutal beginning to bloody end,” the Postwoman declares, but “more than trendy shtick” which all “builds to a coherent theme.”   Also dubbing Lloyd’s JC “gripping,” the Times’s Brantley affirms, “A woman’s touch has not softened the hard and mighty ‘Julius Caesar.’”  The play maintains its “muscular strength and ferocity,” the Times reviewer writes, remarking, “The women playing men here seem poised to challenge the entire audience to put up its dukes—and perhaps to pull out contraband switchblades.”  Lloyd’s “crackling troupe,” Brantley says, delivers the Bard’s poetry “with a fiery fluency” under her “ingenious” staging.  In AM New York, Matt Windman reports, “The acting is extraordinary” and the production “is filled with inventive touches.”  Scott Brown calls Donmar’s JC “demonically fun, punk-pugnacious, occasionally unhinged” in his New York magazine review, and affirms that Lloyd’s “ferocious cast quietly underlines [their] point with joyously unquiet performances.”  “Nervous shivers of race and gender domination run just beneath the show’s skin,” says Brown, but the production’s “gender-flip isn’t polemical; it’s clarifying.”  Concluding that “here’s a Caesar that doesn’t even need balls; it’s got gall,” the New York reviewer asserts that Lloyd uses her conception “to thrilling effect here, teasing out the play’s deeper misanthropy, its anti-revolutionary despair and wounded cynicism.”  In Time Out New York, David Cote describes Lloyd’s staging of Julius Caesar as “blisteringly tense and crystalline” and the company as a “fierce ensemble.”  The man from TONY concludes, “Director and company may take great liberties with their frame, but this may be the most thrilling, lucid and, yes, authentic Julius Caesar for years to come.” 

In the cybersphere, Zachary Stewart writes on TheaterMania that this JC has been “brilliantly reimagined” by Lloyd into “an action-packed, sharp rendition” that “emphasizes the force of personality over the public imagination.”  Stewart’s conclusion is, “It is impossible to walk away from this production without new insights into the original text, which feels as relevant, prescient, and alive as ever.”  On CurtainUp, Deirdre Donovan writes that Lloyd’s transformation of Julius Caesar “ingeniously adds a new twist to the testosterone-laden work.”  It’s “a must-see for Bardolators,” says Donovan, bringing “new meaning to that theatrical phenomenon called ‘double-time’” that “pushes the theatrical envelope, and then some.”  She concludes, “You will be pulled into the action” of “a first-rate director's vision of a Shakespeare play” performed by “a solid ensemble.”  On Huffington Post, which once again ran two notices, David Finkle asserts that Donmar’s prison-set JC  is “all in good, grim fun and works well” and that Lloyd “guarantees that the cast does well.”  But Finkle spotlights “one major, and I mean truly major, drawback”: the Caesar Barber plays and Lloyd directed is “the worse [sic] kind of bully” about whom audiences are likely to say, “Good riddance to bad rubbish.”  This undermines the idea that the dictator’s supporters might indeed be noble (or even entirely rational), weakening the play’s premise.  In Huffington’s other review, Michael Giltz calls Donmar’s Julius Caesar “an exciting new production” that’s simply “the best Julius Caesar I've ever seen” and “certainly one of the top shows of the year.”  Praising the production unsparingly, Giltz goes on to affirm that “the direction is focused and inventive while the performances are clear as a bell, moving and believable at every moment.” 

It was just too much effort to review all the London reviews (and only minimally relevant since I’m not discussing that show), but I have mentioned that the Telegraph gave the show not one, not two, but three bad notices.  Wolf’s IHT review was unfalteringly positive, but as I was surfing the pertinent websites for tidbits of information on the production, I came across a couple of blogs that begged to differ, if you will.  On R3OK, the blogger who calls himself (I’m assuming) HtoHe said bluntly that “whether or not the idea of an all-female Julius Caesar is valid, Phyllida Lloyd’s execution of it was, imo [in my opinion] of course, an unholy mess.”  (The blogger joked that he figured Lloyd had made “a bet that she could put on an all female Julius Caesar and include smoking, swearing and nudity and get half the hacks of the British press to declare it a triumph.”)  Of the basic concept for the Donmar production, HtoHe thought it was “all too embarrassing if, as it seemed to me, the director takes full advantage of the blurring of boundaries to indulge herself—or, being less charitable, to throw all sorts of inconsequential guff into the mix.”  In the end, the blogger summed up: “From the very start, . . . the classic play was used as padding for a prison story that had next to no substance.” 

The blogger Tilly Lunken allowed on her site, Onomatopoeia, that Lloyd places JC in “what appears to be an entirely appropriate context,” but found that the interpretation “does not satisfy because fundamentally it does not address what it arguably should be aiming to—the main drive of the production—the women.”  Lunken, a writer who works mostly in theater, deplored the lack of female characters (there are only two, aside from the prison officers) and asked, “But where were the women?”  Lunken determined that “it appears the entire construct of the women’s prison is just that.  A directorial decision to justify the casting,” or, as the sometime dramaturg put it: “a gimmick.”  Of the prison environment, the blogger said, “It doesn’t hold a mirror to the action, it doesn’t complement the action—it is reduced almost to a container for the action and little more.”  “The key principle of bringing a classical work into a contemporary context,” Lunken, recently accepted onto the Royal Court Young Writer's program, instructed, “is to use the new and working with the existing text create dynamic relationship between the two elements.”  It’s up to theatermakers, the blogger insisted, to “think hard about the implications of a particular setting and casting decision, to work with the politics of this and use them in the work.”  That’s what was missing in the Donmar’s Julius Caesar, as both Lunken and I seem to have felt.