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Royal shakespeare company julius caesar10/7/2023 Joseph Mydell's sardonic Casca and Cyril Nri's lean angry Cassius stand out strongly as well. ![]() The entrance of the irritated police tribunes with 'Hence home, you idle creatures!' and the subsequent cheeky ribbing by the cobbler completes the triple vision: Elizabethan London, unruly Imperial Rome and a modern African dictatorship.Doran fields some powerful and familiar black actors: Jeffery Kissoon is Caesar, a heavyset, smoothly groomed ruler whose self-assured judgment is undermined by vanity.Brutus ( Paterson Joseph) has an ambiguous, restlessly thoughtful nobility.His paternal, exasperated, fond passages with the boy servant Lucius (the RSC debutant Simon Manyonda, of whom we will here more) are touching. " audience comes in to find a stage already full of music, hawkers, quarrels, chants, dancing and bright orange banners of the Leader's face exuberantly worn as shirts or scarves. It's a startingly close fit.The verse-speaking is vibrant, the characters complex." ~ Kate Bassett, "From Ancient Rome to Africa, dictators fall", Independent on Sunday, 10 June 2012 "Now, thought, this political drama is scorchingly reinvigorated in Gregory Doran's staging which - with a superb ensemble of black British actors - translates ancient Rome to modern-day Africa. Anything to avoid admitting our national poet's embarrassing dead-white-maleness." ~ Christopher Hart, "Shakespeare with muscles", Sunday Times, 10 June 2012 ![]() If you think this sounds too fashionably multiculti, you might wonder about Gregory Doran's new Julius Caesar, set in modern Africa, with an all-black cast. Hence the current World Shakespeare Festival. ![]() "We should take pride in Shakespeare nowadays as a world writer, not an English one, just as we should take pride in London being the most international of cities. To see it played by an all-black cast is also to be reminded of the wealth of classical acting talent available in this country.the real strength of Doran's production lies in its attention to character.And, in a male-dominated play, there are strong cameos from Adjoa Andoh and Ann Ogbomo, who, as the wives, respectively, of Brutus and Caesar display a vehement sence of reality denied their deluded husbands." ~ Michael Billington, The Guardian, 7 June 2012, in Theatre Record 2012, Issue 12 "This, of all Shakespeare's plays, badly needs a shot in the arm - and it receives a powerful one in this production by Gregory Doran, the RSC's artistic director designate, who has transposed the action to modern Africa. The production transferred to London's West End, toured the UK and also played at the Brooklyn Academy of Music, New York and in Russia. ![]() It was staged as part of the World Shakespeare Festival that was itself part of the Cultural Olympiad, a festival that was running in tandem with the London 2012 Olympics. The production had an all black cast, the first of its kind at the Royal Shakespeare Company. The first performance of this production took place on. PRINCIPAL CAST: Adjoa Andoh (Portia) Ray Fearon (Mark Antony) Paterson Joseph (Brutus) Jeffery Kissoon (Julius Caesar) Cyril Nri (Cassius).
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