Early in the Trump administration, there was controversy over a New York staging of Julius Caesar in which the actor playing the slain tyrant resembled the 45th president. British prime ministers change so rapidly these days that a similar approach would risk recasting during rehearsal. However, Atri Banerjee’s deliberately non-Spitting Image RSC production stresses the remarkable universality of the play’s dissection of leaders and the led, fulfilling Cassius’s prophecy that Caesar’s murder will be “acted over in states unborn and accents yet unknown”.
The wider political context now is the flimsiness of power. Of the core world leaders who attended the 2019 G7 meeting, only two remain in power and one, Japan’s Shinzo Abe, was assassinated after leaving office. As the psephological sage John Curtice has pointed out, almost no head of government who led a country through Covid is still in post. Such churn gives urgency to the scene in which the conspirators discuss wanting power and what they will do with it; Brutus, leaving Mark Anthony in play, pays later for his kindness/weakness.
