Word: playing
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...other type of paraphernalia imaginable cluttered my vision--all emblazoned with that hated "B." As the trolley rattled closer to Kenmore Square, I resisted a compulsion to yell "Boomer" at the top of my lungs (the once-beloved Red Sox first basemen who popularized the 'George Scott double-play...
...into a multi-media event by employing photographs, film clips and closed-circuit television. From time to time five large screens drop down. On each is projected a different view--now a movie clip, now a still. There are motorcades, massed throngs, and, in the military half of the play, battle scenes and fire-bombings. In the background is a special soundtape collage put together by Mark Dichter, who holds degrees from M.I.T. and Columbia's film department...
Marcus Brutus, the play's longest role, is in the hands of Kenneth Haigh. In 1956 Haigh burst on the scene as the original Angry Young Man in Osborne's Look Back in Anger. Now, in 1979 (the year he turns 47, 49 or 50, depending on what source you credit), Haigh is the Stoic Middle-Aged Man. Clearly at home in Shakespeare's language, Haigh speaks with cool conviction and command, and a feeling for the verse rhythms...
...second-longest role of Cassius, Brutus' brother-in-law who originates the murder plot, a bearded Harris Yulin makes his position more plausible and less villainous than we usually see--and perhaps it should be said that there are no thorough villains in this play, except for the gang that lynches a poor poet merely for having the same name as one of the conspirators...
Still, this is a daring show that sustains interest unflaggingly throughout its running-time of two-and-a-half hours. The greatcritic James Agate once wrote of Julius Caesar: "The play's second half is one long anti-climax. Shakespeare left his play in two halves which no company of actors, however skillful can succeed in putting together." Were he alive and here, I think Agate would change his mind...