Julius Caesar Variety Show
New Theatre, Dublin
★★★☆☆
“This isn’t Stratford-upon-Avon. This is Ireland,” a director setting a Shakespeare play closer to home says in Julius Caesar Variety Show, Joy Nesbitt’s driven satire. We certainly are in our native theatre scene; during auditions, the director claims he’s open to diverse new interpretations, but his notes suggest a preservation of the established order. (“Let’s play it as written,” he says.)
For actors in these auditions, nodding agreeably and needing employment, that means going along with exploitative demonstrations – what if a Roman general’s concerned wife did a slinky dance, or a black actor tapped into some innate rage to play Caesar’s killer? Menacingly, the director (compellingly snide in Ultan Pringle’s performance) seems permitted to carelessly pursue his provocations: “I’m just a theatre kid all grown up.”
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When we watch a black actor (a nicely wary Loré Adewusi) being perceived by a white director only through demands of representativeness, as able only to play roles warped by violence, it opens up questions about an industry that produces only plays with majority white casts. Can we say this is fiction?
There is a sense of anxiety, as Nesbitt’s satire, in aiming to unsettle, relies on less plausible devices. “Don’t lose the melodrama,” Pringle’s director orders when forcing a woman actor (a razor-sharp Pattie Maguire) to give a humiliating performance. That too seems to be the play’s preference, as characters miraculously overhear conversations and become confined by a topically contrived crowd of anti-refugee protesters. Maybe they’re just artists left to go crazy by gatekeepers’ decisions.
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Continues at the New Theatre, as part of Dublin Fringe Festival, until Saturday, September 14th
