Playhouse, Sydney Opera House, March 11
7.5/10
Julius Caesar was my childhood pathway into Shakespeare: a heady mix of history and gripping verse. I skated over the curious plotting: not so much that the titular character’s dead – if not quite gone – by half way, but that this vacuum’s filled by Antony (who’s barely said a word until then) and the utterly arid Octavius.
Brutus and Cassius are constants, and both are finely drawn – although not enough for Brutus to the “the noblest Roman of them all” or Cassius “the last of all the Romans”. Nonetheless, if you can paint them vividly enough upon the stage, and add an Antony who sells us the “Friends, Romans, countrymen” oration, the play can work.
As it does here. Mark Leonard Winter so excels as Antony that his great speech dwarfs the rest of the production. He delivers it variously at the bloody body of Caesar or atop a moveable stairway; using a microphone or addressing us without. These changes in Winter’s physical and acoustic presence amplify every nuance of the rhetorical games Antony plays in manipulating the throng – and us: stirring us and moving us by constant turns.
Alas, this exceptional work is partly undermined when Winter holds his microphone to Caesar’s body when referring to the wounds’ “dumb mouths”, provoking laughter that leaked some of the emotive tension away.
Of course, Antony doesn’t monopolise the play’s illustrious speeches. Leon Ford’s Cassius is the first to strike a chord of truth matched to the verse’s splendour when delivering his epic Act One words to Brutus about Caesar’s mock-majesty: “… he doth bestride the narrow world/Like a Colossus, and we petty men/Walk under his huge legs and peep about/To find ourselves dishonourable graves.”
Director Peter Evans’ Bell Shakespeare production has Brigid Zengeni playing a gender-swapped Brutus, and she, too, gives life to the verse. She trips too lightly across the exhortation to her fellow conspirators (“Let’s kill him boldly…”), but certainly finds the core of her crucial soliloquy when deciding that the republic needs no man who would be king. To back up Brutus’ decision, Septimus Caton presents such an insufferably pompous Caesar as even throws a tantrum.
Peter Carroll is an amusing Casca, and James Lugton a typically reliable Decius Brutus. Unfortunately, the actors playing Portia (Jules Billington) and Calphurnia (Evans insists on the First Folio spelling with an “h”; Ava Madon) waste those characters’ two momentous speeches: Portia’s plea to Brutus to confide in her, and Calphurnia’s hallucinogenic warning to Caesar (“A lioness hath whelped in the streets;/And graves have yawned and yielded up their dead…”). The latter stands near the pinnacle of Shakespeare’s art, and should never be squandered so wantonly.
Evan’s towering red walls work well as a universal setting, while Simone Romaniuk’s costumes slide disconcertingly between modernity and two millennia ago – as do the implications of the play.
Until April 5.
https://www.sydneyoperahouse.com/bell-shakespeare/2026-season/julius-caesar