Julius Caesar

With all the talent available to it, with all the money so obviously lavished upon it, the Shakespeare-Marlowe Festival should have given us a far better Julius Ceasar than the one that opened at the Loeb last night.

The production fairly reeks of effort. There is a huge cast, most of whom snap off their parts with creditable energy under Daniel Seltzer's direction. There are lavish sets and lavish costumes (so many that poor Caesar can scarcely be distinguished from the richly robed citizens he leads onstage). A battle scene, surely the most grandiose ever stage at Harvard, takes up a good portion of the second act.

But this is just about all the production has to offer. What would have been a fine background for an inspired Caesar seems wasted on pallid acting and stagecraft. Never is there an ingenious answer to the technical problems the play poses. Rarely does the acting become sharp; it never becomes inspired.

For this, the fault must lie chiefly with Seltzer, who allowed Mark Bramhall to play Brutus at the top level of intensity throughout the play. Bramhall gives every sentence weightiness, makes every speech momentous. It is with energy, not respect, that he controls the conspirators. His antics make Cassius seem calm by comparison. And in a second act where everyone--Bramhall, David Rittenhouse (Antony), Edwin Holstein (Octavius), and Thomas Weisbuch (Cassius)--is playing at fever pitch, where a ghost puts in an appearance, and where the prodigious battle scene takes up fully ten minutes, the play degenerates into a second-rate melodrama. The giggles heard during what should have been the most exciting moments of the second act ought to warn the cast to slow down and let this Caesar live.

Aside from Bramhall, the leads were unexceptionable and unexceptional. Rittenhouse as Antony delivered his funeral oration energetically to a rabble that performed with precision, though perhaps their screaming responses were too loud and too frequent. In the second half Rittenhouse too was swept away with a pace that seemed to overwhelm everyone. George Hamlin as Caesar was remarkable in making almost no impression while on the stage. He was overshadowed by his attendants in the procession scene, and by the conspirators on the way to the Capitol.

Finally, in a production where sheer lavishness means so much, the very obvious technical slipups made quite a ludicrous impression. An occasional Brooklyn accent is especially jolting in a production notable for its uniformity of speech. The assassination of Caesar, when done with imaginary weapons, loses a great deal of its effect, and a ghost scene in which the ghost of Caesar merely walks onstage, pronounces his lines, and walks away, falls completely flat. The production crew created armor that rattles very loudly, which is especially annoying during what should be impressive scenes--while the soldiers are bearing Caesar's body off the stage, for instance. To top it off, several lines were fumbled.

The set, by Donald Soule, seems a microcosm of the show. It is bulky, well-produced and obviously quite expensive, but throughly uninspired. When two rows of columns are at the front of the stage and one is at the back, that's outdoors. When the three rows are brought together, that's indoors.

Perhaps some of the slipups were simply first-night jitters; perhaps some inspiration will enter the show during its run. Certainly some changes are necessary. When a production with so many to so few of them, the thud is extremely loud.