A murder took place in the speaker’s rooms at the House of Commons on Monday night. Greg Doran, former director of the Royal Shakespeare Company, was stabbed in the front – unusual in theatrical circles where people are more often stabbed in the back – by his successor, Daniel Evans. Rather than being reported to the police, the action was widely applauded since it was part of a potted, all-star performance of Julius Caesar staged to celebrate the 400th anniversary of the publication of Shakespeare’s First Folio.
The setting was appropriate in a number of ways. The current speaker, Lindsay Hoyle, reminded us that one of his predecessors, Thomas Hanmer, was a Shakespeare scholar who published his own edition of the plays in 1744. James Morris, MP and chair of the All Party Parliamentary Group for Shakespeare, stressed Shakespeare’s eternal political relevance. “He deals,” said Morris, “with the danger of tyranny, the narcissism of politicians, the thin dividing line between fantasy and reality.”
Professor Michael Dobson, director of the Shakespeare Institute, spoke of Shakespeare’s importance to international relations and how in Ukraine performances of the plays have become a symbol of resistance to military aggression.
After the speeches came a 30-minute performance of highlights from Julius Caesar which, in that setting, took on extra resonance. Harriet Walter was Brutus and when she uttered the lines “The abuse of greatness is when it disjoins remorse from power” a whole host of living examples flashed across my mind; but Walter was shrewd enough to remind us that Brutus’s political idealism is combined with intellectual vanity.
Simon Russell Beale was an equally fine Cassius suggesting, with mordant irony, that it was not Caesar but those who sanctioned his tyranny who had the “falling sickness”. Andrew French got to the very heart of Mark Antony, mixing crowd manipulation with authentic sorrow in his oration over Caesar’s corpse.
Even the smaller roles were cast from strength. Sebastian Wood, a former ambassador to China and the son of John Wood who was once a famous Brutus, was the Soothsayer, warning Caesar against the Ides of March. Roly Keating, chief executive of the British Library, and Professor Dobson constituted the Roman citizens along with Morris, who had to make a hurried exit to vote in a division: a touching reminder that real politics sometimes intrudes on their theatrical representation.
But how achievable is Morris’s ambition to heighten Shakespeare’s presence at Westminster in order “to improve public discourse”? I dropped into the Commons public gallery before the performance and listened to MPs discussing a “national targeted lung cancer screening programme”. This is an important issue but not one that prompts displays of eloquence. And, on leaving Westminster, I was talking with Janet Suzman, who had earlier played Calpurnia, about how few politicians are gifted public speakers: she cited Barack Obama and, on the British side, I came up with Winston Churchill, Nye Bevan and Michael Foot.
The Commons Caesar was, however, a welcome reminder both of Shakespeare’s endless topicality and of the significance of the First Folio, without whose publication, as Greg Doran pointed out, Shakespeare’s plays would almost certainly have been lost. Doran also told a very good story about a group of RSC actors taking the company’s only copy of the Folio to a performance they were invited to give in the Vatican in 1964. At one point this precious copy was shown to Pope Paul VI who, wrongly assuming it was a gift, blessed it and gave it to a cardinal to add to the Vatican library. It took a good deal of delicate negotiation to retrieve it and restore it to its natural home. Wisely, perhaps, Doran chose not to bring it with him to the Palace of Westminster.
