Review: Shakespeare and Shaw Are a Deadly Combination in The Assassination of Julius Caesar

In a world teeming with dictators and dictator-like personalities, there’s always a timely reason to stage a “relevant” production about Julius Caesar. Eric Tucker, one of the founders of the inventive company Bedlam, has chosen to go that route with his cumbersomely titled The Assassination of Julius Caesar as Told by William Shakespeare and George Bernard Shaw, which is an equally cumbersome and flat-out confounding conflation of Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar and Shaw’s Caesar and Cleopatra now running at the West End Theatre.

Tucker has never been a director to shy away from challenging his audiences, but this production is a bridge too far. Despite a strong cast, The Assassination of Julius Caesar is a misguided, near-incompressible mishmash that makes for an agonizingly long two hours and 15 minutes (without intermission).

The idea might have seemed good on paper: Have two classic plays about Caesar interrogate each other by volleying their playwrights’ takes on him. Shakespeare looks at the ethics of political violence, and Shaw at the ethical costs of becoming a leader.

Unfortunately, this turns out to be a tough thing to make happen in performance. Tucker tosses us back and forth between the plays, beginning with Shaw’s scene involving Caesar (Andrew Rothenberg) and Cleopatra (Shayvawn Webster) at the Sphinx, and then without warning transporting us to Rome where Brutus (also Webster) and Cassius (LABOD) discuss the threat of Caesar’s ascension to power. Tucker whisks us from Egypt to Italy in this way over dozens of scenes, with actors changing roles at breakneck speed. Without having been present at Bedlam’s actual rehearsals for this play, even the most attentive audience member is bound to get lost at some point.

To make matters even more confusing, turns out we are at a rehearsal — Tucker has staged this tennis match between Shakespeare and Shaw as though it were a run-through with a disgruntled troupe of actors who are subject to the whims of a tyrannical director (also Rothenberg) who seems intent on alienating just about everyone in his cast. The Shakespearian and Shavian action often breaks for the actors to discuss lines, go over stage business, argue, have breakdowns, and even gather for a group meeting to talk about feelings.

Ironically, these “behind-the-scenes” scenes are the most entertaining parts of the show. Mackenzie Moyer, who plays Portia, flies into a fury when the director decides to excise her character completely, and Deychen Volino-Gyetsa plays an actor who storms off the stage when the director pries a little too deeply into her personal life.

These little bits of stage drama, though, are not enough to relieve us from the lugubrious task of sitting through the rest of the play, which is littered with bad choices, such as the ridiculous scene in which the Caesar channels Marlon Brando and recites Calpurnia’s dream of the bloody statue in the voice of Vito Corleone.

It’s a shame that some good performances get mired in this muckheap. Rajesh Bose brings Shaw’s god Ra brilliantly to life, and Jonathan Judge-Russo gets laughs pairing up with LABOD in their Casca-Cassius scenes. Webster is revelatory in her performances as Cleopatra and Brutus, and Stephen Michael Spencer’s breathtaking Antony at the end makes us wish that Tucker had stuck just with Shakespeare and directed this cast in a straight Julius Caesar.

Alas, by the time we get to the final scene, we’re so addled by the back-and-forth character changes that we’ve abandoned all hope of comprehending whatever connection Tucker was trying to make between the two plays. In case you’re wondering, Caesar dies in the end. That much, at least, we know.