Rounding out our marking of the 2,000th anniversary of the death of Caesar Augustus (see 19th August. 1st August a touch previous), back to the Globe for a rendering of 'Julius Caesar' last Friday. Bright sun of the previous occasion missing, so from that point of view a much happier occasion.
Bullingdon from Waterloo Roundabout to Bankside Mix (oddly named as it is outside the Blue Fin Building), then hoofed it to the Globe to find the stand there half full. I had not pushed on that far on the bike as I thought it likely to be fully full with the consequent retreat irritating. After the show the stand was still half full but my key was red-lighted in the three or four posts that I tried. Had I failed to properly dock at the end of the outbound leg? Hoofed it back to Bankside Mix where my key was green lighted and so back to Waterloo Roundabout in no time at all. No better way to travel when it is not raining.
The only other transport event was an interesting chap on the train home in black jacket (possibly with tails), black trousers with the sort of broad grey stripes favoured by masons, a very loud tie, a small bag rather than the slightly larger suitcase usually favoured by masons for their accoutrements and an open 'Economist'. Older chap, did not look like a mover on the city front, so what was he? In my experience, masons only come out after dark and they do not wear very loud ties.
Back at the Globe took a couple of beverages on the terrace outside the Swan bar, to find that a waitress served beverage cost 37% more than getting one from the bar. But at least it had the advantage of not interrupting our viewing of St. Paul's Cathedral, rather both striking and rather odd from this point of view and in the then prevailing lighting conditions. Dome and its drum standing up dark and austere above the surrounding buildings, with the two west towers standing detached to the left, with nothing much in between: the dome was all very well, but I am sure that Wren intended that one should see rather more.
Caesar pretty good, although I got on better with the first half - up to the death of Cinna - than the second half. Maybe a matter of stamina.
We opened with various costumed menials putting things up on the stage (which I eventually realised were the decorations which Flavius and Marullus so disapproved of), action which then morphed, seamlessly into the opening of the play; a rather muddied start.
Caesar the right age for once, with bearing, if a touch oafish for someone who was clearly a someone very out of the ordinary. Antony did well with the dogs of war, even if he did seem more like a smoothie in the the corridors of Westminster, rather than a boisterous - but seasoned and successful - soldier. They made rather a lot of the business of the Lupercalian runners touching the ladies in the watching crowd, but failed to make its fertility point and I don't suppose that many in the audience knew what the touching was all about. Crowd scenes generally a bit overcooked, culminating with the (hopefully post-mortem) castration of Cinna, which castration the director would no doubt say was in the text, which it was up to a point. But I am content for such things to be hinted at rather than enacted. The synchronised marching of the soldiers used to frame the battle scenes in the second half was rather tiresome - and reminded me of the rather stronger version of same in a Berkhoff production of Coriolanus at Puddle Dock (see http://www.stevenberkoff.com/buyco.html), one of the very few plays we have left at half time (another being a Macbeth at the Globe. See June 23rd 2010 in the other place).
I had forgotten the extent to which the play was about Brutus, in which connection I thought the role of his wife, Portia, though small, could have been made more of, pointing up the vital turns in the story, full as it was of portents and signs.
In sum, coming back to the Globe after an absence of a couple of years, things seemed to have improved. They have pulled back from pantomime and settled down to more middle-of-the-road performances. Not terribly cerebral, but quite well suited to my aging cerebrum and, presumably, to those of all the holiday makers, many of whom did not speak English very well and for whom bardic English must have been pretty impenetrable. Certainly the young French family next to me did not make it back for the second half.
But I felt that I was missing a lot too and maybe I am going to have to start buying theatre tickets in pairs. Go once to get orientated, do some proper homework and then go again to get the full monty. I seem to recall that Pepys often went to several performances of the same play, so there is good precedent.
PS: thinking of portents and signs, I had suddenly been struck, reading Wilder on the Ides of March, why one might go in for reading the entrails of sacrificial animals, as the Romans did at that time. If one believed that the hand of a god was in the drawing of lots, why should the hand of a god not be in the selection of an apparently healthy animal which turned out to have blemished entrails. Perhaps some unpleasant growth on the outside of its liver; a sign from the god that something was amiss. I associate to the Axiom of Choice, something which I once knew a little about, an axiom which asserts, inter alia, that there is a always choice which can be made from a group of animals. That there is a god. On which note, thoughts turn to siesta.
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