In between rehearsals for Julius Caesar and driving all over southern California for my various teaching gigs, I’ve been reading the Arden edition of Hamlet and various essays on the play. But rather than post about those before I really have anything useful to say, I thought I’d post this week about my Caesar at UC Riverside.
I went in to this production excited about the idea that Brutus destroys the Roman ideals he’s trying to protect by murdering Caesar — that was the central action of the play for me. It’s reflected in the design, in which the set is torn apart over the course of the play. But in rehearsals, I quickly became much more interested in Cassius’s friendship with Brutus. Cassius suddenly seemed like a much more interesting character, and I found myself compelled to put him and his attempts to win Brutus away from Caesar more and more into focus.
It’s typical for me to get excited about the most intimate and personal aspect of the story. Political themes are important, but they only really get my blood pumping as a director when they’re played out through intensely personal interactions. So it didn’t surprise me that the friendship aspect of the story turned out to be more interesting than I realized at first. It did, however, worry me — because I didn’t see how this friendship story related thematically to what I still believed was the central, political, action of the play. My intuition was way ahead of my analysis, which is a dangerous place to be when you’ve already blocked the show and are taking your second pass at the big scenes.
But then I got it. The climax of the famous quarrel scene — and the point in the play at which Brutus seems to give up on Cassius — is when Cassius offers his dagger to Brutus with the words:
Strike as thou didst at Caesar: for I know,
When thou didst hate him worst, thou lov’dst him better
Than ever thou lov’dst Cassius.
Cassius’s motivation has nothing to do with tyranny or protecting the Republic — he just wants to be loved. But the results for Cassius with regard to Brutus are the same as the results for Brutus with regard to Rome. Cassius betrays Brutus’s ideals just as Brutus betrays Rome’s, and just as Rome is destroyed by Brutus’s attempt to protect it, so Brutus is destroyed by Cassius’s attempt to win his love. Brutus is to Cassius as Rome is to Brutus; the central action is played out on both the personal and the political levels.
We open next week.
