Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of Illustrations
- List of colour plates
- Notes on contributors
- Foreword
- Acknowledgements
- Introduction
- The Globe to Globe Festival: An Introduction
- Performance Calendar
- Week One
- Week Two
- Chapter Seven Performing cultural exchange in Richard III
- Chapter Eight ‘A girdle round about the earth’
- Chapter Nine Intercultural Rhythm in Yohangza's Dream
- Chapter Ten Art of darkness
- Chapter Eleven Neo-liberal Pleasure, Global Responsibility and the South Sudan Cymbeline
- Chapter Twelve Titus in No Man's Land
- Chapter Thirteen Tang Shu-wing's Titus and the acting of violence
- Chapter Fourteen ‘A strange brooch in this all-hating world’
- Chapter Fifteen ‘We want Bolingbroke’
- Chapter Sixteen O-thell-O
- Week Three
- Week Four
- Week Five
- Week Six
- Afterwords
- Index
- Plate section
- References
Chapter Ten - Art of darkness
Staging Giulio Cesare at the Globe Theatre
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 June 2014
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of Illustrations
- List of colour plates
- Notes on contributors
- Foreword
- Acknowledgements
- Introduction
- The Globe to Globe Festival: An Introduction
- Performance Calendar
- Week One
- Week Two
- Chapter Seven Performing cultural exchange in Richard III
- Chapter Eight ‘A girdle round about the earth’
- Chapter Nine Intercultural Rhythm in Yohangza's Dream
- Chapter Ten Art of darkness
- Chapter Eleven Neo-liberal Pleasure, Global Responsibility and the South Sudan Cymbeline
- Chapter Twelve Titus in No Man's Land
- Chapter Thirteen Tang Shu-wing's Titus and the acting of violence
- Chapter Fourteen ‘A strange brooch in this all-hating world’
- Chapter Fifteen ‘We want Bolingbroke’
- Chapter Sixteen O-thell-O
- Week Three
- Week Four
- Week Five
- Week Six
- Afterwords
- Index
- Plate section
- References
Summary
The choice of commissioning a young Italian company based in Rome to stage a production of Julius Caesar during the Globe to Globe Festival seemed informed by the same logic that led the organizers to select the National Theatre of Greece to perform Pericles. But, in fact, Andrea Baracco and Vincenzo Manna's Giulio Cesare pre-existed the Festival, at least as a 50-minute-long studio workshop inspired by the first two acts of Shakespeare's tragedy and provisionally entitled Ventitrè, as in the twenty-three stab-wounds inflicted by the conspirators on Caesar's body. And, as it turned out, Caesar's Rome and any reference to the historical setting within which Caesar's murder took place were cut in the pared-down, modern-dress version skilfully performed by six actors (with little doubling) at the Globe Theatre on 1 and 2 May 2012.
Baracco's Giulio Cesare was not as far removed from Shakespeare's play and its classical setting as Societas Raffaello Sanzio's Giulio Cesare, which was performed in the capital as part of the London International Festival of Theatre (LIFT) 1999. However, Baracco's production did catapult Shakespeare's main characters into a world where their innermost fears and desires have effectively obliterated the outside world, the public sphere, and any remnant of functional social interactions. Baracco's take on Shakespeare's play was instead firmly focused on the disjointed inner lives of characters pushed to their psychological and moral limits by the extreme circumstances and events that eventually destroy them. Instead of representing Julius Caesar as a tragedy set in classical Rome or even in twentieth-century Rome, as several productions in English have done by casting Cesare as a fascist dictator, Baracco opted for an original and exciting journey into the play's ‘heart of darkness’, effectively suggested through the heavily symbolic language of physical theatre.
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- Information
- Shakespeare beyond EnglishA Global Experiment, pp. 92 - 100Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2013
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