A radical and often arresting take on Shakespeare’s “Julius Caesar,” “Giulio Cesare” is a signature piece of the Italian theater company Societas Raffaello Sanzio. The troupe continues its residency at the Museum of Contemporary Art through most of November. “Giulio Cesare,” however, is gone after Sunday.
It’s a searchingly strange examination of the themes of Shakespeare’s tragedy–particularly the theme of rhetoric as a weapon and, ultimately, a means to an apocalyptic end.
The man behind “Cesare,” which has toured internationally since 1997, is Romeo Castellucci. In his hands, Caesar’s Rome begins with the sound of an immense whip-crack, followed by an ominous rumble. Something keeps hitting the stage curtain, so that it billows outward. It turns out to be a battering ram, swinging to and fro like a plaything of the gods.
Shakespeare wrote about the powers of verbal persuasion; in the stripped-down “Cesare,” for eight wonderfully varied performers, Castellucci imagines a story focused on Cassius (Sergio Scarlatella) and Brutus (Silvano Voltolina) and the plans to kill the mob’s current favorite politico, Caesar (frail, wizened Maurizio Carra). When the offstage Romans are heard, it’s in sudden, frightening bursts of choral assent–just one nerve-wracking element in Castellucci’s extraordinarily dense sound design.
The production makes full use of technology unavailable to Shakespeare. When one actor begins orating, he inserts an endoscope down what appears to be his throat, the image of which is projected on a screen behind him. We see the literal origins of a speech in progress.
The text is only partly Shakespeare: A host of Latin scholars, including Caesar himself, are interpolated. Visually “Cesare” is like a sculpture garden in a war zone, with statues of all kinds having left their pedestals. At one point a live horse enters a scene; at another point, a sea horse on a wire glides across the stage; a stuffed head of a cat spins around like a dervish, as if the speechifying was too much for one animal to take.
After the intermission, the scene shifts from a white-sheeted environment to a bombed-out landscape worthy of Samuel Beckett. So much for the revolution. Cassius and Brutus are now played by alarmingly emaciated women (Cristiana Bertini and Valentina Picello, costumed like Day of the Dead skeletons). Rome is destroyed. The world readies itself for the next slaughter of innocents.
“Giulio Cesare” has its draggy and overdeliberate passages, to be sure; you sometimes long for more jagged edges, more surprising rhythms. But there’s a mournful beauty to much of it. In Friday’s post-performance discussion with Chicago theater veteran Bernard Sahlins, director Castellucci spoke via interpreter of the play’s “perverse beauty,” its melancholic quality–no less so than “Hamlet,” really–and the “radioactive aspect of rhetoric” he wanted to impart with “Cesare.” Far more a dreamy, poetic image-association game than a Shakespeare production, “Cesare” was intriguing enough to remind audiences there’s more than one way to honor a great playwright.
Fidelity to source material doesn’t mean you simply do the play everyone else has been doing for centuries.
“Giulio Cesare” concludes its run at 7 p.m. Sunday at the Museum of Contemporary Art, 220 E. Chicago Ave.; 312-397-4010.
A one-night multimedia performance of “Laboratory,” part of a new work by Societas Raffaello Sanzio, takes place at 8 p.m. Nov. 23.
