Review: PETTY MEN, Arcola Theatre

Few Shakespeare plays have received the ‘updated for the current political moment’ treatment more than Julius Caesar. In Petty Men, though, our Roman dictator-for-life is not a Trumpian autocrat, but a BAFTA-winning actor.

Our leads are two understudies (they’re never given names beyond ‘U/S Brutus’ and ‘U/S Cassius’) in a “three-star mediocre flop” production of Julius Caesar with a celebrity in the titular role. It’s about to celebrate its 100th performance, but both understudies have yet to go on stage, so they mouth along to the lines in their dressing room.

Life, of course, imitates art, as resentment and eventually violence against the top-billed performers bubble up backstage, but this is only half the story. The most important conflict is not between the understudies and the actors whose deaths they “manifest”, but between the understudies themselves.

Cassius’ understudy (Adam Goodbody) is enamoured with the idea of a life on stage, while Brutus’ playful, party hat-wearing understudy (John Chisham), like his character, is happy to remain on the sidelines, rejoicing in monologues performed alone in the wings. Cassius here is not pushing Brutus to glory for the good of Rome (“Rome” and “the stage” are often used synonymously), but to satisfy his own vision of what success looks like as an actor.

Writers Chisham, Goodbody and Júlia Levai clearly know Shakespeare’s great Roman play inside out, and there is some clever integration of the tragedy’s famous moments (“friends, Romans and countrymen”, for instance, is repurposed as a reassuring direct address from a cast member to the audience after an incident backstage).

Chisham and Goodbody weave effortlessly in and out of Shakespearean dialogue, lampooning some of the play’s weirder lines and giving fine ‘straight’ performances of Brutus and Cassius’ monologues when the occasion requires. Indeed, often not easy to tell where Shakespeare ends and the original dialogue begins.

The show has tied itself in knots, though, trying to be both a character study of two Shakespeare obsessives and a retelling of Julius Caesar, as well as some kind of commentary on the state of contemporary theatre. On a very basic level, why are these characters, both desperate in their own ways to perform in this production, fantasising mostly about killing the actor playing Caesar, and not Brutus or Cassius? The fault may not lie in our stars, but in the way that the writers have tried clumsily to impose one story onto another.

Structural integrity aside, Petty Men is very much capable of conjuring the mood of Julius Caesar, the dread and the nihilism and the sense of inevitable decline. Shakespeare’s ghosts and soothsayers are replaced by sudden flashes of red lighting, ominous voices over the tannoy and robotic broken-record dialogue.

There’s also some creative use of close captioning (by Perri Schofield), the surtitles veering into incoherent confusion as the walls close in on our protagonists. Even here, though, there is a sense of narrative disharmony – blasting “kill the script” above our heads feels out of step with the loyalty to Shakespeare’s text demonstrated elsewhere in the play.

As a celebration of all that is great about Julius Caesar, this works. Those who have heard these speeches a thousand times will hear them in a new, metatheatrical light, and those who have not will receive a compelling introduction. However, as a standalone story, it needs a greater sense of exactly what it’s trying to say.

Petty Men plays at the Arcola Theatre until 20 December