Director Phyllida Lloyd
takes a few liberties to cram her all-female production of Shakespeare’s study
of power and politics into a cheerless women’s prison where lesbian
relationships flourish and Frances Barber’s thug of a Caesar rules over the
prisoners with a rough brutality.
It couldn’t be more different
from Gregory Doran’s recent all-black, vibrantly sun-kissed production for the
Royal Shakespeare Company which was set in a modern African state. Here the
focus is primarily on the internal, with Harriet Walter’s troubled Brutus
struggling with her conscience as she’s egged on by an alert, impassioned
Cassius (excellent Jenny Jules). The feeling of enforced containment generates
a dangerous sense of shifting allegiances and secret plots in a subculture
where the normal rules don’t always apply and the Soothsayer gleans her
information from the astrology pages of Heat magazine.
In Bunny Christie grim, grey
design, the auditorium’s usual red padded benches have been replaced by austere
plastic chairs, and the inmates putting on the production before lock-up are stripped
of individuality by their shapeless grey tracksuits. Prison wardens patrol the
walkways, water pistols serve as guns, and Caesar is not only violently knifed
but force-fed bleach from a plastic bottle.
And although women barely
get a look-in in the original, the actors’ gender swiftly becomes irrelevant –
with Harriet Walter (her hair slicked down, her appearance androgynous)
particularly impressive, finding the whole experience almost unbearably intense
both as Brutus and as the incarcerated perpetrator of unrevealed crimes
Donmar to 9th February
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