Review: JULIUS CAESAR, Omnibus Theatre

A few weeks after millions marched in the USA under a “No Kings” banner and on the very day that a prince was bumped all the way down to, well, our level, having been given the Chuck Connors treatment, Julius Caesar turns up in Clapham. 

So is Tangle Theatre company, with its mission to champion African and Caribbean artistic excellence, just lucky or is Shakespeare excavating a universal truth about people and power always on the button any time, any place? I’m a theatre reviewer, so you won’t need two guesses for my answer!

Fetching up in London after a nationwide tour, this adaptation is highly accessible, uncluttered by the cameo roles with which Shakespeare loved to fill his stage (perhaps so he could slap on the facepaint and garner a laugh or a sigh himself) and balanced more towards the electrifying first half than its slightly pedestrian second. It’s an ideal introduction for kids who, like me at 14, feel the words stuck on a page rather than flying off the stage. They're plays not texts after all!

We open on Yaw Osafo-Kantanka’s witchdoctor/soothsayer, whose drumming and chanting also represents the hoi-polloi, so critical to this play. The energy and danger he projects, recruiting us to his cause at times, is electrifying, but, as ever, a little of this stuff goes a long way and a portion might have been better held over for panto season, not far off now.

Samya De Meo gives a Cassius that was new to me. She’s less the brooding mastermind, the woman pushed to the end of her tether by Caesar (a tall and smug - and you have to say, magnificently named - Roland Royal III) and more a disdainful ridiculer of kingly pomposity. Wild in eye, fiery of speech, this Cassius all but bullies Brutus into the conspiracy, a sharp contrast less in ideas and more in temperament, a can-doer recruiting the only man who can do and get away with it.

But he doesn’t, of course, Shakespeare knowing that he can muse all he likes in the first act on bad statecraft, the dangers of autocracy and the fears attendant on a messy succession, but no usurper can be shown to succeed on the Tudor stage by the curtain. The Essex Rebellion was but two years in the future when Englishmen were first implored to lend their ears to Mark Antony, so Shakey knew he was swimming in dangerous seas.

Remiel Farai, a detached look never leaving his eye, a man contemplating a seismic change in human history as if weighing strategies for an upcoming debate at the Oxford Union, is a splendidly passive Brutus. Here, after a poorish run for me on London stages, I could hear the weight of the words, the rhythms and cadences that reveal doubt and guilt, the line readings delivered beautifully. 

Sematar Ahmed stepped in at short notice as Mark Antony, but the character may have been improved by his working off book. Less the jock athlete and more a mirror of Brutus, just more ruthless, more devious, more attuned to the psychology of the crowd, it’s definitely a “less is more” portrayal at the moment. I liked his glasses too and, when he needs the book no longer, I hope they’ll be retained, albeit swapped for a more Malcolm X style.

Anna Coombs’ brisk adaptation loses little and gains much with its pace and brevity and the timing is almost too perfect. As ever, I leave the play half in admiration that a man could see 2025 so clearly in 1599 - and half in terror too.     

Julius Caesar runs at the Omnibus Theatre until 15 November