Icarus Theatre Collective are promising chilling resonances as they embark on their tour of Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar with dates including Portsmouth’s New Theatre Royal on February, February 21-22.
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00:00 Good afternoon, my name is Phil Hewitt, Group Arts, editor of the Sussex Newspapers. Lovely
00:06 this afternoon to be speaking to Max Levendell. Now Max, you're directing Julius Caesar for
00:12 Icarus Theatre Collective and it's coming to parts including Portsmouth and Crawley
00:18 later in the year. And you were saying, somewhat shockingly but very persuasively, Julius Caesar
00:24 has all sorts of very striking parallels with certain recent leaders of our very recent
00:30 memory. Who do you think of? Yeah, it absolutely does. I don't want to get too dry with how
00:37 much fun and comedy and sex and violence there is in this play, but it does have that reference
00:43 to Trump, to Johnson, to Hitler even, and Putin. The similarities between Caesar in
00:52 real life and Caesar in this play are unsettlingly familiar.
00:58 So what is Caesar actually doing that makes us think of our recent leaders?
01:04 Well most of the stuff that he's done is before the play. The play is actually, it's the last
01:11 two days of his life. And actually he's not in over half the play because it's about what
01:17 happens after. But it is some of the stuff that he has done is, you know, he got one
01:25 of the top senators down on his knees in the forum and poured a bucket of excrement over
01:30 his head in public in front of everybody. He kept, you know, he had other senators beaten
01:36 up. He was constantly talking to the people going, "I'm standing for you. I'll take the
01:43 punishments that the Senate gives for you." Whenever he wanted the law passed before he
01:49 became top emperor, when he was like 37, he would, that if he thought the Senate wasn't
01:54 going to go for it, he would go down to the forum and talk to the people and say, "This
01:59 is a law that the Senate doesn't want you to see," and show it to the people and force
02:04 such momentum for what he wanted to happen.
02:06 Is this faking a selflessness that absolutely wasn't there?
02:10 Fake news, everything, his war in, he conquered Gaul. He was a great military leader. He did
02:16 do that, which Gaul is France today, basically. And then he decided to keep going into England.
02:24 And he got slaughtered. I mean, as we all know, nobody could conquer England. And he
02:31 got slaughtered. But he sent his, I think it might have been Mark Antony, actually,
02:35 he sent Mark Antony back to Rome with a report on how brilliantly the battle had gone, saying
02:40 that they scared all the savages of England. And so, you know, there's nothing really there
02:45 to rule. So he decided to come back. It's like, no, they destroyed half your army and
02:51 sent you back, and you fled in your ships back across the Channel. And that's the kind
02:56 of thing.
02:57 Your point is, this is a bit of a warning for the future, isn't it? But Caesar has come
03:02 up, Trump did, briefly, we hope.
03:05 Briefly, we hope. But he's coming back, right? And Caesar came back, too. He got the top
03:11 job in Rome, one of the two consuls at the top of the Senate. And then they indicted
03:17 him, because he was very familiar. And he was facing prosecution. So he decided to go
03:23 lead a war to conquer Gaul for 10 years to avoid this prosecution. And he was a great
03:28 leader, but he was avoiding prosecution. And then he came back. And he was so terrified
03:36 to the senators that they had the choice, do I go against him and possibly get killed?
03:42 Or the, you know, he was, as I said, he was having the senators beaten up, he was humiliating
03:47 them. There were a couple of people that just kind of disappeared. And we don't actually
03:50 know if that was Caesar or not. But the senators were certainly terrified of this. And they
03:56 could, okay, do we placate him? And most of them were selfish, wealthy merchants, who
04:04 went, yeah, we'll just give Caesar a tribute and elect him, literally elected a dictator
04:10 for life. So that he would keep on their side.
04:16 It's fascinating and worryingly persuasive production. Really good to see that, Max.
04:21 Thank you very much indeed for your time.
04:23 No worries. Thank you so much, though.
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