![]() Julia Lisa, who’s a phenomenal actor who plays Mark Antony is also our accent coach, so she’s got that accent down. Something similar has happened with the New York accent. The RSC production where they set Caesar in an unspecified country in Africa gave this alternative take on the poetry with a generalised accent, and that created a very beautiful lyricality in the poetry, driving the iambic pentameter. But I’ve always stood by the accent from the beginning. And can I ask how the poetry has interacted with the accent because the New York accent has that distinctive beat?ĭ: Definitely and we’ll see how people perceive it on the night. So, we’ve been using that in the monologues particularly. He would watch a monologue and say “Give me more fire” or “Give me more water, make it more fluid” and I think that’s such an interesting way to tackle the material. For instance, I’ve nicked something from Sam Mendes, because he’s so in touch with how poetic Shakespeare is, a lot of the directions he gave were based off the elements. But on an indirect level, poetry’s been very involved. Q: And has that use of poetry been a technique you’ve used in the rehearsal process?ĭ: Not as directly as that. ![]() Marina’s just excellent at tapping into Shakespeare’s character building and I love Portia as a character. I remember in one of the rehearsals she brought some of Sylvia Plath’s poems in and performed some of her prose and that’s how we then got to Portia through poetry. Marina, who is playing Portia, is just dynamite. Q: Would you say that, for such a small part she’s perhaps one of your favourite characters to delve into in this crime world?ĭ: Oh yeah! My favourite characters are Portia and Cassius. Portia specifically has been so exciting for me, because she’s a perfect example of how deeply Shakespeare can tap into the human psyche. But as much as their dialogue is incredibly sparse, we can do really wonderful phycological studies on them, and see what that kind of a world does to a woman. Portia admittedly is one of the only two female characters in Julius Caesar. ![]() Whereas Shakespeare understands them more as people and gives them psyches. When you look at a lot of the Early Modern Drama, people like Christopher Marlowe, it seems that he’s never met a woman in his life! The women in his plays are just barely existing and are either very pretty or very weird. Another reason why is that I write a lot of poetry and connecting with performance on a lyrical level is probably what draws us all to Shakespeare.Īlso, he gets people, he understands them. The first big role I ever got was when I was very young in A Midsummers Night’s Dream and that was my first introduction to acting and the world of performance and it stuck with me forever. What would you say is special about Shakespeare for you?ĭ: I’ve gotten this question before, and it’s a hard one because it’s such a personal question. Q: That’s so cool, especially as that familial relationship is a huge theme in many of Shakespeare’s works. In many productions, the political element is so huge, so it has been extremely interesting to work that into an even more emotional landscape. It has allowed us to really have fun with the emotion of the play. What we’ve trying to tap into through that is some Freudian themes and the very primitiveness of killing the father. Specifically, I was drawn to the setting because I am obsessed with mobster stories, and it makes the play so personal for Caesar because the relationships in the mob are not like the president or the prime minister and his cabinet, but much more closely resembling a father-son dynamic. Q: So would you say this mafia setting makes the betrayal feel more personal?ĭ: I think that’s definitely what we’ve been going for. Scorsese has a huge influence on how we see mobsters and has been a big inspiration for that kind of nocturnal world. This allows us to work with the aesthetics of the mob and play with how mobsters are perceived in our cultural consciousness. This allowed us to downsize from what the play is best known for, which is as this very political intense spectacle, into a more micro-political familial tragedy. Q: What drew you to the setting of this production of Julius Caesar, and what is the setting?ĭ: The concept emerged very early on, perhaps over a year now, to transpose Julius Caesar onto the setting of the 1950s New York mob. With Julius Caesar’s opening night fast approaching, I managed to get an interview with its director Devki Panchmatia in between the ramping up rehearsal schedule:
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